2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

their acceptance in scientific botany’s elite inner circles. In this paper I show
how the adoption of methodologies promoted by the Royal Society allowed
gardeners to address silviculture in a manner which had the appearance, if
perhaps not the content, of science. This spurred their acceptance both among
their clients and in the field of academic botany.
Charles␣ M. Brotman University of Rochester
HSS Abstracts
Helmholtzian Acoustics in a Darwinian Key:
James Sully, Edmund Gurney, and the Psychology of Music in Victorian
Culture
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Although it is widely known that Hermann von Helmholtz’s work On the
Sensations of Tone deeply influenced music theory in Anglo-American culture,
we still know little about the reception and modification of his ideas in the
second half of the nineteenth century. This paper examines the efforts of two
English psychologists, James Sully and Edmund Gurney, to reconcile
Helmholtz’s work with evolutionary theories of mind and nature known through
the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Writing in the years after
Darwin and Spencer had themselves theorized on the evolutionary significance
of music, Sully and Gurney both believed that music was important because it
elicited powerful emotional feelings from men and women living in an
increasingly skeptical age. Like many other Victorian scientists, in other words,
Sully and Gurney sensed that aesthetic culture could function as a genuinely
spiritual alternative to religion. If Helmholtz’s work legitimized their quest to
put music on a scientific foundation, the “law of evolution,” it seemed, was
still needed to account for the mysterious “power of sound.”
Janet Browne Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine
Discovery
One well-established way into the literature of scientific travel is to consider
specific voyages. Recently we have also become accustomed to thinking of
the various scientific practices in which travelers engaged, the construction of
facts in metropolitan centres back home, and the pragmatic consequences of a
voyager’s return as seen in the possibilities he or she negotiated for creating
expertise and enhancing a career. Here I would like to approach the theme
from a slightly different perspective and think about the social economy of
the ships themselves, in this case as laboratories. My case study is the scientific
research vessel Discovery, first commissioned by the Royal Geographical
Society for Robert Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-4. Although
the ship was lavishly fitted up for scientific purposes and the voyage earned
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