2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Petra Werner Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Composing the Picture of Nature,
or Alexander von Humboldt’s English Correspondents
In this presentation, I will describe the extent to which Alexander von
Humboldt’s English correspondents helped him construct the picture of nature
found in his book “Cosmos, a Sketch of a Physical Description of the World.”
I will base my evaluation on the correspondence he carried on with English
naturalists. (Many of these letters remain unpublished.) Humboldt himself
depended on these letters from English colleagues, citing them often, for the
composition of that five-volume work of his later years. He carried on a
correspondence with a total of 109 English scientists and writers (a list will be
presented), of which some 38 are mentioned in “Cosmos”—along with citations
of their work and letters. The extent of the correspondence with a given
individual does not always indicate its significance for either of the writers: a
rather detailed correspondence exists with Herschel, but only a few letters
passed between Humboldt and Darwin. Yet Darwin was an important
correspondent for Humboldt. The contact made with most of Humboldt’s
English colleagues had not only a scientific component, but a social one as
well—indeed, both aspects of the relationship overlapped. This relationship
became particularly important for Humboldt when he was attacked in some
reviews by prominent English writers—he expected support from his friends.
H
S
S
Simon␣ R.␣ E. Werrett Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
An Odd Sort of Exhibition:
Spectacles of Science and the Russian State in the Eighteenth Century
In 1675 a young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote a memorandum describing
“An Odd Thought concerning a New Sort of Exhibition.” One of Leibniz’s first
designs for an Academy of Sciences, the “Exhibition” he described was a
distinctly dramaturgical, spectacular form of operation, hybridizing Francis
Bacon’s Solomon’s House with the theatricals of German carnival. This paper
follows the Leibnizian exhibition into reality as it traces the role of spectacle in
the formation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in early eighteenthcentury
Russia. The place of spectacle in the history of the sciences in Russia
has been neglected in the past, but for the first fifty years of its existence,
academicians produced spectacular theatricals such as allegorical fireworks
displays and museological shows which served to bind the Academy to the
Russian court and government . I explore how these spectacles promoted
academic and courtly concerns by focusing on celebrations surrounding an “Ice
Palace” built in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1740. A fine example of Leibnizian
theatre, the Ice Palace mobilized artefacts and skills drawn from the Academy’s
179