2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
While it was once generally assumed that massive floods had been responsible for
sweeping trees and plants from the land, and depositing this material in lakes and
estuaries, new evidence in the 1830s led some observers to argue the alternative,
that the plants which became coal had actually grown in the same places where
the deposits subsequently formed. Strangely, this debate has not attracted attention
from historians commensurate with that which it received from geologists. This is
probably partly due to the perception that studies of coal arose primarily from
economic rather than scientific motives. However, I aim to show that the
development of theories about the origin of coal was intrinsically connected to
changes in the understanding of geological processes such as elevation and
subsidence, as well as to the new appreciation of the magnitude of geological
time. In this paper, I focus on contribution made to the coal debate by William
Logan in 1840 (two years before he became the first director of the Geological
Survey of Canada). Although his role may have seemed small at the time, he was
later to receive most of the credit for establishing the in situ theory of coal formation.
In addition to reconstructing part of this neglected historical episode, then, I am
also concerned to analyze the ways in which Logan and his supporters made use
of the recent past to establish their preferred version of events, and their motives
for doing so. Their stories, told at the expense of other participants in the debate,
have proved to be highly durable, persisting almost unchanged to the present.
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Sujit␣ P. Sivasundaram Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
Objects of this World: Missionaries, Musuems and the South Pacific
When the London Missionary Society was formed in 1795, it was decided that
the first missionaries should be sent to the South Pacific. These missionaries,
and those who followed them, wrote an enormous number of letters and reports,
and sent back many ‘curious’ artefacts. Shells, idols, botanical specimens, spears
and Pacific islanders were amongst the trophies sent home. Their supporters
and friends returned the compliment by shipping back livestock, steel and printing
presses, for example. A missionary museum was set up in London where the
relics of ‘savagery’ could be displayed. Similarly, objects from Britain took
pride of place in the houses of certain South Pacific people, who were favoured
by the missionaries. This paper will consider the politics of exchange and how
integral this was to the representation of a distant place. How did these objects
denote that the mission was succeeding? How did mission supporters encourage
their agents by sending objects to them? Was there a relationship between the
shells and the idols that were sent home or the steel and the livestock that was
sent to the South Pacific? Indeed, scientific practices were demonstrated in
relation to objects that would not normally be considered under that title. Pacific
islanders, who arrived in Britain, for example, were often treated as natural
historical specimens. They were on occasion put in cages, portrayed without
clothes, and spoken of as wild animals. How did missionaries’ museology fit