2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
the study and analysis of past societies. What I would like to explore in this
paper is what Enlightenment Geographers meant when they used the word
‘description’ and, perhaps more importantly, exactly what I mean when I use
the word. In so doing, I will explore how philosophers of science have used
the concepts of description and analysis.
Jordan Goodman University of Manchester Institute of Science and
Technology
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Mr. Huxley’s Voyage?
Making Imperial Space and Knowledge in the mid-19th Century
This paper focuses on the voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1846 to 1850) as an example
of scientific practice, its products and its representations in nineteenth-century
voyages. The ship was engaged by the Admiralty in surveying the east coast of
Australia and the south coast of New Guinea to ensure safe sailing for steam
shipping between Australia and India. On its survey, the ship collected a substantial
amount of physical data—terrestrial magnetism, weather and ocean soundings—
and produced a number of charts and sailing instructions for the Admiralty. In
common with other naval surveying vessels of the period, the ship carried several
naturalists, including John MacGillivray, John Thomson and James Wilcox, in
addition to Thomas Huxley, who practised their science and collected officially
for public institutions and privately for commercial contacts. Natural history
extended to ethnology and linguistics, both of which figured largely in the voyage’s
collecting activities. All of the naturalists, many of the ship’s officers, and the
commander kept journals and sketchbooks. Because of the existence of this material
it is possible to go far beyond the published accounts and to get very close to the
experiences of many on board. Historians have almost totally neglected (with a
few notable exceptions), the sea and the ship as sites of scientific practice, especially
in the nineteenth century. This paper will redress this balance and aims to place the
sea and the ship at a crucial conjuncture of nineteenth-century science and empirebuilding.
It will explore the nature of science on the move the integrative role of
voyaging in scientific practice, including surveying and the key role of perspective
in representing the practices and products of the voyage, in order to make better
sense of what it meant to carve out an imperial space at the same time as doing
science in this crucial period.
Michael␣ D. Gordin Harvard University
A Hierarchy of Sorts: D. I. Mendeleev and the Periodic Table
The periodic table’s formulation by D. I. Mendeleev (1834-1907) in 1869 is often
seen as one of the capstone theory constructions of the physical sciences in the
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