SERVANTS OF NATURE
A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities
LEWIS PYENSON
and
SUSAN SHEETS-PYENSON

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson 1999

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PRAISE

‘A considerable achievement.’ CASPAR HENDERSON, New Scientist

‘At best a heroic visionary, at worst a megalomaniac Frankenstein: either way triumphant individualism is taken for granted in the stereotypical scientist. So too is the disinterested purity of research conducted under lab conditions, all external considerations excluded like so many bacteria from a sterile vessel. Yet the reality has always been quite otherwise: the world refuses to stop at the laboratory door, and that has led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs as well as its worst abuses. This highly readable, subtle and thought-provoking scientific history goes beyond whistle-blowing to consider more subtle and ultimately perhaps more interesting questions of how a changing institutional context has constrained the content and direction of we too unquestioningly take to be ‘pure’ science.’

Scotsman

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: Science and Its Past

The discipline of history of science

Inspiration and method

The end of science

PART I: INSTITUTIONS

1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution

The Mediterranean world

Eastern cultures

Islam

The Middle Ages

2 Teaching: From the Time of the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution

The rise of the German university

The German research university in context

Universities elsewhere

3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies

Engines of the Scientific Revolution

The rise of the scientific correspondent

Eighteenth-century expansion

Nineteenth-century consolidation

The emergence of specialized societies

4 Watching: Observatories in the Middle East, China, Europe and America

The Islamic observatory

Chinese astronomy

Innovation in instruments

Time and prediction

Astronomy and related disciplines

5 Showing: Museums

The development of modern museums

The British Museum and the ‘new museum idea’

Museums in Europe and the United States

Colonial museums

Colonial and metropolitan museums: some comparisons

Descriptions of colonial museums

Museums in Canada, South America, and Australasia

6 Growing: Botanical Gardens and Zoos

The development of botanical gardens

Kew Gardens

The evolution of zoological gardens

The rise of public zoos

PART II: ENTERPRISES

7 Measuring: The Search for Precision

Measurement in antiquity

Syncretism and measuring instruments

Newtonian measurement

Timepieces

Standardization

The ideology of precision

Measurement and industrial progress

Absolute measurement and error analysis

The transformation of mechanical precision

Old programme, new effects

Philosophy and practice

Precision regnant

Precision and the human spirit

8 Reading: Books and the Spread of Ideas

From script to print

Facilitating the birth of modern science

The rise of the scientific journal

New forms for new audiences

Showing science: the art of illustration

9 Travelling: Discovery, Maps and Scientific Expeditions

Who discovered whom?

Travellers in antiquity

Maps

Progression of people and ideas in the Malay Archipelago

European expansion

A century of wonders

The new encyclopaedia

Classifying nature

The scientific expeditions

10 Counting: Statistics

The odds

Precision and numbers

Surveying and statistics

Terrestrial means

Statistics physical and social

Doctrine of certainty

Twentieth-century uncertainty

Average lives

The popular triumph of averages

11 Killing: Science and the Military

Gunpowder

The vocabulary of military science

French military builders

Naval stars

The star chart

Military mappers

Military weathermen

Applications and prestige

PART III: SENSIBILITIES

12 Participating: Beyond Scientific Societies

The rise of literary and philosophical societies

Associations for the advancement of science

The common scientist

Scientific clubs for everyone

The overseas extension of European models

Women in science

The example of Madame du Châtelet

Women elsewhere

13 Appropriating: Science in Nations Beyond Europe

Colonial scientific societies

Early colonial universities

Independent universities

The research university in the United States

Scientific migration

Australasia

Scientist missionaries in South America

Science at American universities

Science at Japanese universities

British India and Dutch Indonesia

14 Believing: Science and Religion

Science in the Counter-Reformation

The Merton thesis

The Webster thesis: millenarianism and science

The Enlightenment

Deism

Natural theology

The argument against Darwinian evolution

Twentieth-century developments

15 Knowing: Progressing and Proclaiming

Magic and science

Baconianism

Encyclopaedism

Materialism

Positivism

The polemical positivism of Auguste Comte

The eclipse of positivism

16 Knowing: Relativizing

The century of relativity

Mach and Einstein

The reception of Einstein’s thought

Eclecticism and hope

FURTHER READING

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

THE FONTANA HISTORY OF SCIENCE SERIES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

Science, Ernest Gellner has contended, is the mode of cognition of Western industrial society. These words beat a ragged, fading tattoo across the twentieth century. The music asks: why do we seek to know? What is science? Who sees with Western eyes? The pipers form a splendid procession. But will it last? Will we continue to think scientifically? Or does the spectacle mark the end of an epoch? In view of its past, does science have a future?

A reader may ask how science can disappear. With all our modern contrivances and information, how – short of an environment-wrenching catastrophe – could science come to an end? Yet the circumstance has occurred before, when past civilizations like Rome and China expressed little interest in seeking explanations for natural phenomena. They delighted in mechanical contrivances; they celebrated canonical wisdom; they published enduring works of art and literature. But they were not driven to push back the frontiers of knowledge, to use a metaphor associated with European expansion.

The present book has emerged as an enquiry into science as a social activity. It relates directly to the prospect of science in our time. We do not proceed by appealing to the heavy theoretical machinery and the long-distance sentences that are now fashionable in our discipline. We fly no philosophical, political, or methodological colours. We celebrate the observation attributed to writer Marcel Proust, that methodology, when visible in writing, is like a price tag worn on a suit of clothes. We are mindful of poet John Keats’s sentence about rejecting poetry that has a design on us.

As we enter a new millennium, the words of Francis Bacon possess a freshness and special pertinence. To invoke his phrase ‘servants of nature’ is to offer relief from those who would exaggerate or minimise the interpretation of science broadly conceived. This phrase balances the self-satisfaction, if not the hubris, of some scientists with Bacon’s recognition that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Bacon knew that evidence from the natural world comes in many forms; evidence, in some manner going beyond prejudice, can produce general judgments and, on occasion, laws.

Our method will be apparent from the Table of Contents. We identify and elaborate a number of themes that we believe are central to exploring the role of science in society. The themes fall under three headings: institutions, enterprises, and sensibilities. We trace the themes through the recent and more distant past, through Western and non-Western cultures. Our work is grounded in the belief that history may help us see clearly today. We draw inspiration from the great works of French scholarship that celebrate history as a craft based upon a manipulation of concrete particulars, a tradition inaugurated by Marc Bloch and perfected by Theodore Zeldin.

This book is in fact a child of French North America. Conceived in French Canada, where we taught at Université de Montréal and Concordia University, it finally emerged in French Acadiana, where we work at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. While writing it we ran up many debts. We wish to thank our students and colleagues, who heard us elaborate these ideas. We owe special thanks to Eliane Kinsley and Marc Speyer-Ofenberg, and we are grateful to Roy Porter, Crosby Smith, and Bill Swainson for critical comments. Anyone who has lived through a marital collaboration knows what is involved, but children are the most perceptive observers of it. We dedicate this book to our three spirits.

Lafayette, Louisiana

May Day 1996

Introduction: Science and Its Past

Our thirteen-year-old daughter is studying the history of the United States of America. She is memorizing lists of warriors and battles, statesmen and treaties. She sees pictures of people in powdered wigs and frock coats, on horseback and in carriages. Ordinary people wearing rags and buckskin also appear in her books and films. She learns about hopes and fears in times past. Previously, she learned about history from a German perspective. (She can recite the fiercest North Sea storms of the past fifty years.) Our older son learned history first from the point of view of French-Canadian nationalists and then in a traditional English-Canadian vein, before he, too, had to acquaint himself with American facts and foibles. We hope that our children will achieve the level of cultural literacy now being established by prominent intellectuals. If, decades from now, they do not quite recall why George Washington crossed the Delaware or why Chappaquiddick stands for more than an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they will nevertheless retain the notion that what is told about the past is a function of language and politics.¹

Whatever gaps there may be in our children’s schooling, in some sense they will have been educated. Schooling substitutes for travel, for direct experience of distinct cultures. Yet today the distinctness is disappearing. Electronic media and air travel have brought people nearly everywhere in the world into contact with clinically tested drugs, prewashed blue jeans, and the internal-combustion engine. The signs of this convergence have provoked commentary for much of the twentieth century. However the great mixing up is understood, it certainly qualifies as one of the key phenomena of our time.

How did it happen? How did we arrive in our present circumstances? These are the questions posed by historians. They offer many kinds of answer. It has to do with the price of corn over the past 150 years, an economic historian might say. More important are the precedents of Common Law, a legal historian might counter. It is the art of war, thunders a military historian. Everything is family demographics, a social historian counters. Each of these explanations is a splendid room in the mansion of our collective past. But they do not seem to help us understand the form of the objects we use on a daily basis. Does any one of them on its own explain what we see as we go out to purchase the ingredients for dinner or as we watch the evening news on television?

Regardless of the special values that we hold – the religious creed, political persuasion, aesthetic preference, and moral sensibility that together define our character and give meaning to existence – what we experience every day derives from our grasp of the natural and physical world. The following pages investigate how this perception has related to the world of human activity over time. Philosophers and social commentators have argued about how knowledge relates to social dynamics – the regimes of family structure, governmental taxation, religious celebration, and professional obligation that loom large in cultures and civilizations. Perceptions do vary with time and circumstance, but they are not necessarily grounded in incommensurable systems of belief. Microelectronics and molecular biology, for example, which allow all people to share in computer games and biochemical therapy, seem to follow one set of principles everywhere, even though the context of their use varies considerably. The present book explores how knowledge of nature has found a place in society in times past. Sometimes it has transcended language and place. Sometimes it has been anchored firmly in a particular culture.

Our understanding of past knowledge has its own past. Early writings in history of science legitimized a temporal institution, intellectual tendency, or moral lesson. In 1667 Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) promoted the aims of experimental science in his history of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious association of men of science in the seventeenth century. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) defended Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–1790) notions of electricity against traditional European views in a history of science first published in 1767. And a portion of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s (1770–1831) lectures on the history of philosophy, appearing in the 1820s and 1830s, served to instruct readers in his opinions about natural philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whom Hegel surprisingly admired. Use of the word history was then as much a synonym for narrative and inventory as a by-word for polemic.²

With the nineteenth century, histories of science reverted to the distant and remote past. The impetus came from the crystallization of the historical profession and its installation in European universities. Proponents of the discipline of history required a method to distinguish themselves from the naive, descriptive narrators of previous generations. The discipline came to centre around the treatment of manuscript documents, which had found their way in large numbers to central repositories like the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Library of the British Museum in London. The task of the historian became one of transcription, translation, and commentary. Here were the building blocks for synthetic treatments. Historians required their students to master dead languages, old-fashioned handwriting, and ancient chronologies.

The painstaking examination of past science appealed to a number of people throughout the nineteenth century. There were physicians and chemists who, at the end of their career, sought to describe how the method of their own science had evolved. There were mathematicians and astronomers who, having been trained in classics, sought to transcend the ennui of a provincial school or government office by scrutinizing the work of significant predecessors. There were philologists who recognized that the languages of European colonies – notably Sanskrit and Arabic – held a key to a significant literature about ancient and medieval writings on nature.

Nineteenth-century discoveries about knowledge in the remote past are remarkable. The astronomical innovations of medieval Islam, both observational and theoretical, were discussed in the research of Louis-Amélie Sédillot (1808–1875). Euclid’s geometry, studied for nearly two millennia as the primary model for clear thinking, received a canonical expression at the hands of Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928). The notion of medieval Europe as a scientific wasteland came into question through Pierre Duhem’s (1861–1916) elaboration of the writings of philosophers at the University of Paris. The deciphering of planetary tables on Babylonian clay tablets by Joseph Epping (1835–1894) established the first reliable chronicle of antiquity.

Learned periodicals arose to circulate findings among the committed band of historians of science. By the last third of the nineteenth century, courses of instruction provided a showcase for the esoteric speciality. As academic philosophy spun out into hundreds of camps and factions, history of science found a practical use in the burgeoning field of epistemology – the philosophical discussion about how we know things. And as the rise of mass education stimulated an interest in teaching methodology, history of science emerged as the most reasonable way to teach physics, chemistry, and natural history. The so-called genetic presentation of scientific disciplines like chemistry and physics, according to which students received an appreciation of old ideas in chronological order, dominated much of science instruction up to the middle of the twentieth century.

The discipline of history of science

Nineteenth-century writings about history of science are grounded in the notion that modern science is a gift of Western Europe. Writers believed that scientific method and practice distinguished the people of the West from the civilizations that the West had conquered. Art, music, and literature were matters of taste; Japanese painting and poetry, for example, could be held only to differ from European painting and poetry. Science, however, was a matter of truth. All peoples, furthermore, could acquire it. A convenient justification for imperialist domination of the world came in the form of instruction in the canons of Western reason. Historians of science were among the firmest apologists for the superiority of European intellect.

The philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) looms as a major figure behind much writing in history of science. In Comte’s view, humanity had passed through various stages. Science, using experiment and mathematics to verify theories, would usher in a new age of prosperity and harmony. Comte established a hierarchy for the sciences, with astronomy at the apex and physiology near the bottom. Over time, he believed, all inquiries into nature would become more like mathematical physics. He also outlined how humanity had progressed from a religious worldview to a scientific one. This positivist orientation, where qualitative and prejudicial notions fell by the wayside, animated the beginnings of sociology, the quantitative science of human affairs. To bring the new golden age into being, Comte revived the French Revolution faith in Reason and established a church of positivism. Fundamental to the new doctrine was a critical examination of the evolution of science, demonstrating its grand unity and progress. To tell this story, the curators of the Collège de France (the elite institute for research and popular teaching in Paris) appointed Comte’s disciple Pierre Laffitte (1823–1903) to a chair of history of science.

Laffitte accomplished little in the course of his long tenure as the world’s most visible historian of science; he was entirely overshadowed by Paul Tannery (1843–1904), an administrator in the French state tobacco monopoly who had occasionally taught at the Collège de France. Tannery had published a large corpus on the history of the exact sciences, from classical antiquity through medieval Islam to the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century. He established a European-wide network of colleagues who shared his passion. Developing a model that would have appealed to Comte, Tannery stated that science originated in Hellenic Greece, passed through Islamic stewardship to medieval Europe, and then blossomed in the seventeenth century. It was quite entirely an affair of the West.

In 1900, on the occasion of scholarly celebrations surrounding the grand Paris Exhibition, Tannery convened the world’s first international congress devoted to history of science. He assembled colleagues from Europe and put together an impressive programme. The congress resulted in a permanent commission to plan for future gatherings, establish an international society, and publish a periodical. The organizing epistolary activity (his correspondence was published in many volumes by his widow) contributed to Tannery’s dossier as Laffitte’s successor at the Collège de France. But politics intervened to deny him the academic position that he merited. Third Republic secularists passed over Tannery, a practising Catholic, in favour of a philosophically inclined disciple of Comte’s. When Tannery died of pancreatic cancer in 1904, the newborn discipline lost its most vocal advocate.

Tannery’s attempt to form a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of a number of initiatives for promoting Western civilization. Intellectuals sought organizations and causes that, in spanning the nation states of Europe, could project a common front against barbarism. They proudly pointed to the institution of the Nobel prizes, the creation of the world court in The Hague, and the convening of international congresses in fields of study from mathematics to history. The initiatives depended, however, on funding from national sources. The projection of scholarly and scientific excellence, based not on international assemblies but on national institutions, became a card in the game of diplomacy. Nations tallied up their Nobel laureates, art museums, libraries, and grand research laboratories. During the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially as a result of European wars and political squabbles, the discipline of history of science followed distinct trajectories in various national sectors.

Germany, the land of the research doctorate, contributed dozens of university courses and a number of periodicals. The key figure there was Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938), a medical doctor who in 1905 became director of a privately funded institute for the history of medicine and science at the University of Leipzig. Sudhoff’s successor in 1925 was the Paris-born and Swiss-educated Henry Sigerist (1891–1957), who in 1932 became director of the new Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Great Britain found an energetic patron in the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, the Canadian-born and American-acculturated Sir William Osler (1849–1919). Osler cultivated Charles Singer (1876–1960), who in the 1920s obtained a chair of history of science at the University of London. France continued the philosophically inclined course of Comte with Emile Meyerson (1859–1933) and Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918), which culminated in the Platonism of the Russian-born Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964). And in 1928, Italian-born Aldo Mieli (1879–1950) instituted the International Academy of the History of Science and located it in lodgings in Paris provided by Henri Berr’s (1863–1954) Centre International de Synthèse.

All these efforts produced mixed results. Scholarship in Germany was generally compromised by war and political savagery; Sudhoff, in his eighties, willingly embraced Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Willy Hartner (1905–1981), one of the brightest lights in Germany, studied at Harvard and became a rare opponent of Hitler in Germany. Singer and his wife Dorothea Waley Cohen (1882–1964) generated scholarly surveys and collections, but they produced few students; Osler’s querulous disciplinary successor at Oxford, biologist Robert T. Gunther (1869–1940), found a passion in scientific instruments. Mieli fled Vichy France for Argentina, just as he had fled fascist Italy for Paris; he died there in obscurity, a victim of Perón’s wrath. Koyré left Paris for Egypt and then New York; he subsequently received an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The change was unmistakable. Talented scholars moved from Europe to the New World.

Notwithstanding his unceasing propaganda in favour of medical reform (he was a consultant for the establishment of socialized medicine in the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada), Sigerist promoted significant scholarship at Johns Hopkins. He found two singular disciplinary fellow travellers in émigrés Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) and George Sarton (1884–1956).

In the 1920s, Austrian-born Neugebauer was the brilliant student of mathematician Richard Courant at the University of Göttingen. Neugebauer elected to focus his scholarly interest on history of mathematics, rapidly becoming the most accomplished interpreter of mathematical antiquity, from the Babylonian clay tablets to Ptolemy’s astronomy. He earned his living, however, as the paid editor of a major journal of mathematical abstracts. Fascism drove him to a position at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1939 to a chair in the history of mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Neugebauer’s unparalleled scientific authority and his access to scholarly resources led to a school of disciples based on mastery of languages, primary and secondary literature, and above all the technical details of the exact sciences.

If Neugebauer was wary of generalizing and popularizing, Sarton revelled in the broad sweep. Born and educated in Belgium, Sarton used his inheritance to create, in 1913, what has become the leading scholarly periodical in history of science, Isis. Following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, he fled to London with his British wife and infant daughter. There he lived on the brink of starvation until in 1915 he sought his fortune in the United States as a promoter of Tannery’s vision of history of science. He found willing listeners in university administrators and capitalists who were interested in appropriating European culture. In 1918 Sarton obtained a salary from the Carnegie Institution of Washington for maintenance at Harvard University’s Widener Library as a special researcher. The arrangement continued over the next thirty years, during which time Sarton gradually acquired professorial privileges, edited Isis, and produced a grand outline of the history of science up to the Renaissance. He envisioned history of science as the privileged intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities. In his view, history of science was the true record of human achievement.

Sartonian generalizing and Neugebauerist specialization often find expression today in writings about science past. It might be said, indeed, that Sarton’s vision lived on for nearly a half century after his death, in 1956, through the enterprise in chronicling the history of science in China conceived and directed by Joseph Needham (1900–1995) at Cambridge. At mid century, however, the emphasis on encyclopaedic chronicle, ponderous biography, and antiquarian curiosity began to recede in favour of methodology. Whereas Sarton and Neugebauer did not often justify the particular focus for their energies (beyond, say, noting something about every science writer in the twelfth century or transcribing and interpreting all known coffin lids with astronomical cyphers), the middle third of the twentieth century demanded relevance. That is, the new generation of scholars found themselves called to consider the end of their vocation. What did Renaissance astronomers or Puritan experimentalists have to do with human suffering and political change? Did the power and prestige of social institutions determine the shape of ideas about nature? How could specialist, scholarly apparatus illuminate the deep structure of human thought?

Physicians in classical antiquity knew that art is long and exhausting, while life is short and demanding. One must gradually build up an intellectual arsenal to attack significant problems. Practical results can certainly be obtained by ingenuous debutants, but even here method and knowledge are everything. Three scholars – Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996), Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983), and Robert K. Merton (b. 1910) – mixed appropriate quantities of innocence and experience to transform our vision of history of science. They did so by interpreting the prosaic side of scientific endeavour.

Inspiration and method

In the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn is widely recognized as the most influential commentator on the meaning of science. Derek Price is seen as the guiding spirit behind the quantitative measurement of scientific development. Robert Merton identified the normative criteria for scientific activity and the institutional constraints that guide the life of scientists. Their achievements are the more remarkable because their careers encompassed much else. In an age of specialization, they were polymaths – people able to innovate in diverse ways.

Across the decades spanning the middle of the century, the three interpreters of science share a common modus operandi. Most apparently, each is a brilliant stylist. At a time when academic writing discouraged use of first person singular, their intensely personal sentences leap off the page. Kuhn, Price, and Merton each formulated a seminal theoretical overview that was based on a close reading of critical episodes in science. Kuhn examined Copernican astronomy, energy conservation, and quantum physics; Price scrutinized medieval astrolabes, Chinese horology, and measuring and calculating devices from classical antiquity; Merton placed the early years of the Royal Society of London under a microscope and then examined the career of elite American scientists. Each sought general truths by extrapolating from definitive studies of carefully selected examples.

The men who transformed history of science avoided encyclopaedic studies of the kind pursued by Sarton, Neugebauer, and Needham. Common concern with the social dimensions of scientific enterprise led to books about science in society at large – Merton’s early treatment of science in seventeenth-century England; Kuhn’s analysis of the Copernican revolution; Price’s lectures about measuring scientific growth. But their appeal to learned precedent (a distinguishing characteristic of the scholarly life) was based on the advice of personal informants, rather than on systematic bibliographic travail. Lack of scholarly apparatus notwithstanding, each man expressed intense interest in organizing documentation for the next generation of scholars. Kuhn animated the international effort to assemble interviews and private correspondence known as the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, a project more than any other that has alerted the scientific and scholarly world to the importance of preserving the record of recent science. Price was the most vigorous academic promoter of the quantitative measurement marketed by Philadelphia’s Institute for Scientific Information and now used extensively by countless agencies and analysts. Merton collaborated intensively with Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) at the Institute for Applied Sociology in Columbia University, where he assembled sociological documentation on a wide range of phenomena.

They were products of elite universities and all enjoyed the privileges of accumulated honours, but they lent their voices to new institutions and assemblies. Kuhn was entirely Harvard educated, obtaining a doctorate in theoretical solid-state physics under John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (1899–1980); he sat in uneasy harmony between history and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley (where an inheritance allowed him to reduce his teaching obligations) until in 1964 he moved to a programme at Princeton tailored to his measure. He helped Charles C. Gillispie (b.1918) steer the signal achievement of American scholarship, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Price obtained a doctorate in experimental physics from the University of London in 1946. A second doctorate in history of science came from Cambridge in 1954, following which he joined the singular company of scholars in history of science at Yale. He energetically supported new societies and new periodicals. Merton went from Temple University to Harvard, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology. He participated in launching the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

The three found their earliest and strongest voice in the seminal article, rather than the weighty tome, but all mastered general presentations as well as specialized analysis. Following a number of monographs (among which was his brilliant doctoral dissertation), in early middle age Merton produced collections on the sociology of science and social structure. After the profound but general study of Copernicus and the appearance of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn issued a searching, technical analysis of the birth of quantum physics. Price published meticulous studies of clocks and calculators as well as collections of essays on measuring science.

Masters in the realm of ideas, from the time of their youth they were no strangers to practical matters. All three men were schooled in the arts of manual dexterity, and all three knew the vagaries of fortune in commerce. Thomas Kuhn’s father Samuel was a Harvard-and-MIT educated hydraulics engineer from Cincinnati, a veteran of the US Army Corps of Engineers who established himself in New York City, worked for a bank, and was active in the New Deal recovery. Samuel Kuhn was also a master woodworker, who trained his son in the use of hand tools; a perfectionist, he urged Thomas Kuhn to excel, and the scholar son recalled that he was influenced most by his father and Harvard’s James B. Conant (1893–1978). Derek Price’s father owned a clothing and haberdashery establishment in London’s West End. At the age of sixteen in 1938 Price was appointed physics laboratory assistant at the new South-West Essex Technical College, where in 1942 he received a bachelor’s degree. He taught evening classes in adult education while carrying out his own research for an external doctorate at the University of London. Robert Merton, the son of an immigrant carpenter, grew up in working-class South Philadelphia; while a teenage professional magician, he chose the name by which he is now known after considering other variations on ‘Merlin’. These tactile sensibilities are common themes among leading twentieth-century intellectuals. In their autobiographies, none less than physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994) have emphasized the importance of manual training.

Although they were not pacifists, Kuhn, Price, and Merton, like Einstein and Popper, avoided bearing arms during times of conflict. In the Second World War, Kuhn and Price, duly certified with an undergraduate degree in physics, carried out technical research – Price with South-West Essex’s Principal Harry Lowery (1896–1967, an expert in musical acoustics) on the optics of hot metals, Kuhn in the American-British Laboratory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Merton worked on military-related propaganda and psychological profiles in Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research and its successor institute, the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Each master rose to the summit of the academic world after a short period of ministering in partes infidelium. Kuhn arrived at Berkeley in 1956 when the university there was still in the process of overcoming its provincial heritage. Merton left a lectureship at Harvard to become professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, from which he fled to Columbia in 1941. A postdoctoral Commonwealth Fund fellowship allowed Price to study theoretical physics at the universities of Pittsburgh and Princeton. From 1947 to 1950 the newly married physicist taught applied mathematics at Raffles College in Singapore, where he was briefly the colleague of the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993).

Parkinson is famous for studying the flow of people at cocktail parties and for proposing laws regulating bureaucracies, for example, ‘work expands to fill the time available for it’. Parkinson’s search for social laws and mechanisms finds a counterpart in the life work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton. Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions as an abrupt change from one worldview to another has brought the word paradigm (proposed earlier by Merton) to nearly the same level of recognition as Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) repression and Einstein’s relativity.³ Price’s revival of the term invisible college (first used to describe a group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers) and his discussion of exponential growth (known to historian Henry Adams [1838–1918] around 1900) have led to a large industry involved with quantifying scientific achievement.⁴ Merton’s elaboration of scientific norms and accumulated advantage (the Matthew Effect), his analysis of anomie in working-class America, and his pioneering development of such notions as the focus group, have made him the most widely known sociological thinker of our century.

One question attracted the interest of the three masters in the 1950s. This was the extent to which science depended on the unique contributions of isolated geniuses. They delved deeply into the phenomenon of simultaneous and multiple discoveries. A persuasive argument in favour of a social history of science would stem from the contention that notions or ideas were independent of the personal circumstances of a researcher, that particular interpretations of nature were in some sense the product of their time. The historical evidence the three men had assembled by the early 1960s demonstrated just this contention. The confluence of learned opinion, noted in Price’s book Little Science, Big Science, marks a turning point in the discipline of history of science.⁵

By the late 1960s, the search for a general understanding of science, stimulated by the work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton, led to renewed interest in quantitative measurement and close scrutiny of scientific institutions and specialties. What were the pathways of authority in diverse disciplines located in special cultural settings? Did all disciplines and technologies function in one way? What were the practical conditions for consolidating a new discipline? How did the constraints on and opportunities for funding generate new research programmes? Do civil unrest and war stimulate or retard the generation of new ideas? Who is qualified as a researcher in science? How have educational institutions set the pattern for scientific research? Careful attention to these questions produced scores of sophisticated analyses and monographs. As the decade of the 1960s closed, history of science, as a learned enterprise, achieved an intellectual vitality envied by many and diverse commentators.⁶

The end of science

In Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of science, major changes can occur within a particular discipline. That is, new visions of the world do not necessarily destroy the social structures that may have nurtured them. Kuhn also wrote about how disciplines change form, capturing problem areas from neighbouring fields of study and abandoning special pursuits to a new group of researchers. The late twentieth century has witnessed unusual ferment in the evolving taxonomy of scientific disciplines. New disciplines like computing and cognition have taken away large areas of mathematics and psychology. Physicists lament hard times much as classicists complained about declining interest in their discipline a century ago. Most of all, we see the proliferation of an astonishing variety of technical discipline, complete with trade journals and academic programmes. Science is not a victim of its own success, as has been claimed; rather, the times promote technology.

Today science is threatened with absorption by technology, in the way that Hellenistic learning eroded under Roman domination. Roman architects and administrators used existing knowledge to produce monuments of temporal authority – roads, aqueducts, markets, and public buildings. The durable monuments of Roman civilization, however, were its laws. Romans used what worked to establish what was right. Abstract truth was an affair for Greek tutors.

The early twentieth-century desire to establish truth was an outcome of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which led into modern times. But today, echoing Roman sentiment, morality is the watchword. Public servants, for example, are castigated for failing one or another standard of ethical purity. However, since we have no universally accepted notion of goodness, we are surrounded by an appeal to eclectic principles and credos. Eclecticism appears in architecture, with whimsical adornments alluding to diverse precedent. Eclecticism is revealed in the way that orchestras focus on compositions before around 1960, largely bypassing living composers. In the world of letters, all expressions have been called into question. The evidence suggests that we have gone beyond the modern.

The ‘postmodern’ approach to ideas has extended to science. In postmodernist quarters, it is sufficient to assert that all ideas are expressions of power relations. In the view of postmodernist commentators, scientific writings are merely codes for reinforcing the authority of people in charge. Knowledge, according to Michel Foucault (1926–1984), is ‘not made for understanding – instead it is made for cutting’.⁷ For Foucault, knowledge is about commanding people incisively. It is about separating things. It concerns morality and values. But it has no privileged claim to truth.

Historian of technology Leo Marx locates postmodernism in the political pessimism of the 1970s. In his view, postmodernists reject the Enlightenment ideal of progress and human perfectability. Sceptical in the extreme, they repudiate all large-scale interpretations of culture and history. The human condition is held hostage by vague, universal forces called power relations, borrowing a metaphor from the Scientific Revolution. But ‘unlike the old notion of entrenched power that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, postmodernists envisage forms of power that have no central, single, fixed, discernible, controllable locus. This kind of power is everywhere but concentrated nowhere’.⁸ As a result, in Marx’s view, postmodernists focus on microscopic manifestations of power. These writers are typically uninterested in long projects that systematically document large populations. Vague, impressionistic surveys share the billing with narrow, idiosyncratic discussions of printed texts.

How did postmodernism find a place in the history of science? Animated by the programme of social history elaborated during the 1960s, the 1970s saw significant works of scholarship and dedication. The innovations of Merton, Price, and Kuhn found concrete application in analyses of eighteenth-century German chemistry, physics in modern Germany and the United States, French scientific institutions, British natural history, and the general issue of the Newtonian synthesis. But this systematic and time-consuming labour took place in a time of growing anxiety about the material survival of the labourers. A long period of economic contraction coupled with demographic changes resulted in a dearth of academic posts for an entire generation of young scholars. Historians of science fared better than linguists or classicists, but the academy groaned under the mass of men and women hired in the flush of the fat 1960s.

The ingenuous assertions of the 1960s – that war is the root of domestic poverty, that racial prejudice and discrimination against women are structural features of capitalism – derived from a perception of social life; to understand the world one had to measure its demography and political economy. By the 1980s, however, mere writings were held to be at once examples and sources of oppression. Postmodernists claim that the ideas and institutions of modern science are irredeemably sexist; that experiment and mathematics, applied to the investigation of nature, are little more than tricks; that science has more in common with styles of clothing than geometric certainty. The assertions appear in the absence of persuasive documentation, for the role of evidence itself is called into question. Indeed, documentation for postmodernists is mere adornment. The content of footnotes or endnotes matters less than the appearance of having appealed to instance and precedent – a matter of legitimizing authority.⁹ Sociologist Bruno Latour has published widely reviewed essays about the scientific work of Einstein and Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) without appealing to their scientific publications. Another postmodernist, Latour’s sociologist colleague Steven Shapin, alleges in a survey titled The Scientific Revolution (1996) that the revolution was a ‘non event’¹⁰ – even though his examples persuade a reader of the cause in question.

Latour and Shapin are cavalier about evidence because they hold that all knowledge derives from social interaction. In a sympathetic reading of Latour, philosopher Chris McClellan summarizes the extreme form of this contention: ‘everything is actively linked to everything else, while the only form to this seamless cloth comes from the varying durability and strength of the associations that tie it together.’¹¹ Shapin’s unusual approach to evidence and reason lies at the centre of a related essay, A Social History of Truth (1994). There he contends that in seventeenth-century England, rhetoric and social standing overwhelmed open discussion of experimental results, and that as a result from its inception modern science has maintained standards and practices at odds with the search for universal truths.

Shapin’s sociology of science has generated unprecedented discussion in the pages of the journal founded by George Sarton, Isis. Historian Mordechai Feingold observed: ‘Shapin’s approach is ahistorical. He denies the historian possession of any privileged knowledge of the past. Meanings and intentions in history are forever lost, and all one can do is concentrate on ideals – “publicly voiced attitudes”…’ Feingold affirmed the importance of assuming that ‘there are historical facts that can either sustain or invalidate interpretations’, and he insisted ‘that a scholar who abolishes boundaries between facts and interpretations must be held accountable’. Feingold again summarized Shapin’s methodology: ‘Notwithstanding the “elaborate” sources Shapin has gathered, all too often his conclusions are shaped by a confusing and inaccurate discussion of the literature, including citing out of context and the occasional cropping of texts.’ Shapin himself replied to the criticism, but without mentioning Feingold by name or providing a reference for Feingold’s review. Feingold then patiently reasserted the importance of evidence and Shapin’s misleading use of it: ‘Thanks to a skillful deployment of rhetoric – copious repetitions intended to drive a message home and the articulation of many key sentences in a subtle and confusing manner – the reader, who has not infinite time to engage in hermeneutics, can easily mistake the conceivable for the actual.’¹² Although we can imagine a flying horse and may deliver orations about it, the image remains firmly in the realm of fiction.

An exchange about the African roots of Western science also reveals the postmodernist style. Sociologist Martin Bernal has contended that much of Hellenic wisdom derived from Egyptian civilization. Bernal believes that ‘many cultural similarities that could reasonably be attributed to independent invention in distant communities should not be so explained for those between societies as close in time and place as Egypt and Greece’. But in commenting on Bernal’s work, historian of science Robert Palter requires stronger canons of reason. Palter notes that the Egyptians had no mathematical astronomy resembling Greek works, that Egyptian mathematics never attained the sophistication of Babylonian and Greek expressions; and that the traditions of medicine in Egypt and Greece diverged considerably. The point is that Bernal’s desire to demonstrate that Aryan civilization derived from black antecedents displaces a concern for evidence.¹³ Postmodernist palladins now ride to the rescue of false assertions. In a spirited review of a recent book that criticized propositions advanced by both Bernal and Shapin, the historian of science M. Norton Wise has declined to admit more than that the critics have ‘doubtless … located some blunders’. Wise prefers to submerge substantive issues in a farrago of unrelated material.¹⁴ By their allegations of wilful misrepresentation, these exchanges are untypical of academic debate in history of science. They point to significant discontent with disciplinary standards.

The word discipline carries many meanings, anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, and all of them relate to authority.¹⁵ A leitmotif of the careers of Merton, Price, and Kuhn is a concern with the bounds of authority in science. To explore authority they counterposed the scientific discipline with its complementary social structure, the corporate institution. Disciplines function according to general, abstract rules and principles; they attract adherents who earn their living in various ways, profess manifold credos, and pray to diverse gods. Institutions, however, operate by corporate structure and private covenant; they demand allegiance to a chain of command. At the risk of oversimplification, one might say that disciplines exhibit an abstract solidarity while institutions exhibit a more earthy, organic solidarity. Exploring the authority of disciplines and institutions to elaborate the counterpoint of tradition and innovation, in Kuhn’s words, is the project that has animated historians of science since the 1960s. In this book, we begin by considering scientific institutions.

The postmodernist interlude reminds us that generalization is a privilege of experience. The concrete experiences analysed by historians of science – whose number as full-time, dues-paying, certified practitioners is only in the thousands – have transformed our vision of the human condition. They give us new pictures of the ways that people have seen the natural world, and they have added to a long list of misconceived apprehensions. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the discipline of history of science is indeed regular, cumulative, and progressive.

Recent debates about whether science expresses truths about the world call to mind an observation by a sixteenth-century patron of natural knowledge, Thomas Gresham (1518/19–1579). Councillor of state, founder of the British stock exchange, and endower of a college that served as the nucleus of the Royal Society and persisted into the twentieth century, Gresham proposed a principle of economics that has been epitomized as: ‘Bad money drives out good money.’ That is, silver currency will inevitably force gold currency out of circulation. The principle applies more generally to governments, trades, and professions. In a parliamentary system of government, the actions of one corrupt delegate can provoke a vote of ‘no confidence’ that will produce new elections. Gresham’s Law suggests why professional corporations are concerned about enforcing standards. If isolated unscrupulous practices shake confidence in, for example, stock brokerage, physical therapy, or dental surgery, people will cease patronizing the enterprise. In the world of scholarship, outrageous or demonstrably false assertions can bring an entire specialty into disrepute. Gresham’s Law has found an application in the history of science through the claims of postmodern writers.¹⁶

An elegy for postmodernism has been written by Frank Lentricchia, professor of English at Duke University and for decades one of the most persistent critics of the notion that ideas have integrity. He confesses that he lived a double life. He read great literature because it transported him with insight and delight. But he taught that ‘what is called “literature” is nothing but the most devious of rhetorical discourses (writing with political designs upon us all), either in opposition to or in complicity with the power in place’. There were two of him. ‘In private, I was tranquillity personified; in public, an actor in the endless strife and divisiveness of argument, the “Dirty Harry of literary theory,” as one reviewer put it.’ The contradiction produced a crisis and a response. Lentricchia finally decided that there were writers, clever and dull, whose writings could be read with pleasure and profit. Some writings, he has concluded, transcend the accidental circumstances of the writer.¹⁷ The observation carries over to science. Some of what we see is conditioned by our upbringing, but seminal syntheses of natural knowledge transcend the circumstances of their formulation.

We do not choose our parents, our mother tongue, or the circumstances of our early years. The world is not made for our effortless gratification. Rather, we respond to the imperatives of existence. The latitude of that response – how much we do by choice and inspiration and how much we are instructed to do by way of convention and authority – is one of the most interesting problems for people who study the course of cultures and civilizations. The following pages will have succeeded if they convey a sense of the many ways that we have seen what is all around us.

I INSTITUTIONS

1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution

Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.

Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test.¹ Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.

Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.

Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.

Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.

School rituals deriving from religious or moral outlooks vary from place to place. Yet all schools subscribe to one common idea. They hold that knowledge may be acquired through diligent study. There are other kinds of knowledge deriving from religious or artistic inspiration. But schools hold that most things can be learned. The central notion here concerns a distillation of tradition. Learning about knowledge, largely from books, is what has been called science for a thousand years.

In schools, a master imparts knowledge to acolytes, who may eventually create something new beyond their lessons. Whether scholastic lessons are abstract or practical, esoteric or mundane, schools prepare students for a place in society. That place is generally keyed to facility with the written word, which has been the most secure means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that schools invented writing, and hence that schools are the prime mover of history – the science of knowing the past by its documentation.

In this chapter and the next one we examine how schools of higher learning have been involved with scientific tradition and change. We shall see that academia has both promoted scientific innovation and also stifled it. One of the challenges facing universities in the new millennium will be to implement new ways of breathing relevance into the accomplishments and promises of the past.

The Mediterranean world

What we know about science education in antiquity derives from a variety of documents: a few hundred clay tablets from several sites in Mesopotamia; a few treatises written on papyrus; and diverse histories and texts recopied and reprinted in Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Latin. To this must be added inscriptions on stone, masonry, coins, and pottery, precious castings and carvings, and the accumulated wisdom of archaeology. Because our knowledge of the distant past derives from fragmentary sources, it has sometimes been said that the study of antiquity appeals to people who like mastering a small, fixed syllabus. The sources, however, are much more abundant than commonly imagined.

Clay tablets allow us to conclude that schools existed in Mesopotamia, and that they coincided with the earliest representations of the Sumerian language about 3100 BC. Among the documents of Old Sumerian, which existed until about 2500 BC, are school exercises – lists of signs and words. At the time of the Semitic invasion of Mesopotamia, about 1700 BC, we find a compendium of celestial omens called the Enuma Anu Enlil. These omens concern the moon’s eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with fixed stars; solar eclipses; weather and earthquakes; and planetary stations. They held special importance for those who believed in astrology, a system of correspondences constructed between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. The celestial phenomena must have been catalogued over centuries and at diverse places by trained observers. These circumstances suggest an early social pairing of priestly and scholastic functions.

Many of the Sumerian calculations we possess treat practical measuring problems, often involving land area. (In modern terms they reduce to complicated algebraic equations, often cubic or even quadratic expressions.) The problems are sometimes formulated with what we may call malice of forethought (correct answers are integral numbers), and sometimes they have absurd proportions (lengths stretching more than a thousand kilometres or food for an impossibly large army). We have problem sets both with and without solutions, and some solutions feature elementary mistakes. We must conclude that the corpus relates to instruction in schools. The techniques were no doubt useful for keeping track of state assets, but it seems more reasonable to imagine that this specialized knowledge served better to discipline young minds.

The presence of codifying abstruse calculations (whatever their ostensible, practical referent) implies the existence of schools, even if we cannot say much about scholastic organization. Egyptian mathematics, for example, is based on unit fractions – fractions where the numerator is always one. It is possible to speculate about the origin of such a convention (in terms of family structure, inheritance practices, land tenure and taxes), but there can be no disagreement about the ultimate impracticality of the convention for advanced mathematics. Among the few surviving compendia of Egyptian mathematics, we find calculations dividing the contents of a jug of beer into minuscule parts, obviously a school exercise by its lack of utility.

A new kind of teaching emerged in the fifth century BC, and it left its mark on learning in all cultures with access to the Mediterranean world. The innovation related to a group of Greek teachers known as Sophists. They were private professional pedagogues (like later-day itinerant lecturers) who operated in a free-market economy. They would teach by contract whatever people wanted to learn. Their syllabuses suited individual tastes, and their pitch seems to have been a mixture of affable cultivation and practical skills designed to propel a citizen forward in his city.

Their innovations notwithstanding, Socrates (ca.470–399 BC) and Plato (ca.427–347 BC) were teachers in the Sophist tradition, even though they distinguished themselves by their strong claim to methodological precision and systematization of knowledge. Plato’s Academy occupied a large athletic facility long used by teachers like him. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who might have succeeded Plato, created his own school at another athletic facility, the Lyceum. Aristotle’s chosen successor Theophrastus (372–287 BC) produced written anthologies of his pre-Socratic predecessors in addition to general manuals and new works. He purchased land near the Lyceum and donated it in perpetuity to his colleagues for a school, although the Lyceum’s library left Athens for Anatolia as a result of an ideological schism. Later the library returned to Athens and eventually found its way to Rome (as spoils of conquest), where it received wide notice. Permanency of place and syllabus, coupled with the international and public nature of instruction, produced a search for certainty rather than, as with the Sophists, mere expediency.

The Academy and the Lyceum were institutions of higher learning. They departed from the smorgasbord of Sophist offerings whose heritage we find, today, in undergraduate liberal-arts curricula. Young people associated with these schools absorbed particular truths as well as the spirit of the place, and then contributed to the discourse; it pleased some men (we have no clear record of women scholars) to stay on for part or all of a lifetime. The excitement of scholarly discussion and the presence of libraries, where knowledge was collected and stored, made such a choice attractive. We possess no diplomas from antiquity because the world of Greek learning was so small as not to require them. A quick conversation would be enough to establish a person’s credentials.

State funding ensured the contemplative life of these colleges, which continued in some form for many hundreds of years. At least at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, academic contemplation related directly to political involvement. Because the end of all learning was to train better citizens, scholars often applied themselves to statecraft. The goal was to produce someone like Henry Kissinger or, more optimistically, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom was a distinguished academic before entering politics.

The Big Three – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – closed the Greek golden age. In the far-ranging conquests and the subsequent Hellenizing process initiated by Alexander the Macedonian, these and other thinkers of contemporary renown received tremendous exposure. What distinguishes the sequence of the Big Three is not speculative moral or political philosophy, but rather a tradition of collective enquiry into nature. They also sought explanations rooted in experience and capable of standing up under sustained, reasoned debate. Whatever the philosophical colour of knowledge-seekers in Hellenistic times (the philosophies came in dozens of hues), their accomplishments depended on libraries and secular centres of higher learning.

Institutions with a teaching function began to take shape, emphasizing the search for knowledge of nature, with the result that the contentious ethical-political side receded into the background. A pupil of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalerius (ca.345–293 BC), deposed as dictator of Athens, went to the Egypt of one of Alexander’s generals turned potentates, Ptolemy I Soter; there Ptolemy, acting on Demetrius’s advice, founded the institute for advanced study known as the Museum of Alexandria. The name suggests a secular temple for receiving inspiration by the muses, the nine avatars of arts and letters (including astronomy) in classical antiquity. Though under the direction of a priest (until Rome imposed a supervisor) and with their material needs overseen by curatorial staff, the Museum’s fellows were free to study what they liked. They lived sumptuously at the king’s expense. They had outdoor galleries and lecture theatres for learned discussions, and they ate in a large dining hall. Attached to the Museum were a botanical garden and what became the largest library of Mediterranean antiquity, the Serapeum. The prestige of the Museum made it a magnet for scientists throughout Hellenistic and Roman times – Euclid (fl. ca.295 BC), Apollonius of Perga (fl. ca.200 BC), Aristarchus (ca.310–230 BC), Eratosthenes (ca.276–ca.195BC), Archimedes (ca.287–212 BC), and Hero (fl. AD 62) all resided in Alexandria for longer or shorter periods. Museum fellows could and did take on pupils – the grammarians Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (fl. AD 40) and Apion (fl. AD 30) are traditionally held to have studied there under Didymus (b. 63 BC). Scholars generally found it a safe haven from political storms. The Museum was the nerve centre of a cultural community that we would find today in places like the Cambridges.

The Museum inspired copies at the administrative centres of Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Seleucia, and Rhodes. The Attalids of Pergamum in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) imitated the Alexandrian example by creating a medical school and magnificent library, an environment of learning that centuries later nurtured the Pergamum native, the famous physician Galen (ca.129–ca.200). A second-century contemporary of Galen’s, the great thinker Claudius Ptolemy (ca.100–ca.170, not related to the royal family) held a professorship at the Alexandrian Museum, part of the small number of chairs in philosophy that Egypt’s nonresident monarchs, the Romans, had financed. After AD 200, however, the Museum began to lose some of its intellectual centrality, despite the extraordinary achievements of Ptolemy. Galen’s writings suggest as much, because he visited the Museum and wrote disparagingly about its physicians. Alexandria’s Museum – with its hundreds of thousands of rolls of books and its heritage in speculative philosophy, with its tradition of high-table meals and sparkling dinner conversation – is a distant mirror of twentieth-century universities. It is difficult to say how much was left of the library and its intellectual circle when Caliph Umar, following a tradition of book burnings stretching from the pre-Socratics through the early Christian zealots, ordered a perhaps largely symbolic purification by fire in AD 646.

Although the ancient museums appear much like the best of our universities today, their line to the present is broken. The medieval arts and philosophy faculties in Europe were not exactly corporations for generating new knowledge; indeed, they owe more to secondary-school instruction in antiquity than they do to the academies and museums. In their final form the seven liberal arts (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics or music; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which formed the base of medieval university instruction, may be traced to schools of the first century BC. By the imperial Roman period, however, in the schools that retailed these liberal arts, literary studies overwhelmed natural sciences. Like their European successors, Hellenistic and Roman engineers, surveyors, and sailors learned their craft apprentice-style.

The schools of higher learning at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere (or rather, the collection of professors of grammar, rhetoric, law, and medicine at these locations) continued into the sixth century AD, when they were extinguished by Christian fanaticism or barbarian neglect. But the classical tradition nevertheless survived for a thousand years, in Constantinople. Between 425 and 1453, diverse classically inspired schools provided the administrative elite of Byzantium.

The warriors of the Fourth Crusade turned their attention to the conquest of Byzantium. They sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then set about to conquer the outlying provinces. The first Latin emperor of Byzantium, Baldwin I, asked Pope Innocent III to send professors from the University of Paris to found a Latin institute in Constantinople. Innocent agreed to the plan. Also in the thirteenth century, Paris founded a Collegium Constantinopolitanum, designed to lodge and train a score of Byzantine clerics. When Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople in 1261, he revived higher learning by appointing George Acropolita (1217–1282, a politician, general, and historian, whom he had freed from prison) to the chair of Aristotelian philosophy. Acropolita also served as ambassador to Rome, effecting a reconciliation of sorts between the eastern and western churches. Twelfth-century Europeans knew about classical learning thanks to hundreds of years of translation from Arabic, but Aristotle entered the fledgling European universities on the tide of Greek learning that issued from Byzantium. It is possible that the notion of European faculties of higher learning – variously guaranteed by church and state – derives from Byzantine precedent.

Eastern cultures

Learned colleges appeared in other ancient civilizations, such as South Asia. The end of the Vedic period in India, about 500 BC, saw the emergence of a wandering brotherhood of secular teachers, the vadins. They codified their teachings when imaginative literature began to appear in writing, which until then had been used for administration, commerce, and music. The vadins were in some measure South Asian Sophists, and their activity led to the great schools of Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism, founded by Vardhamana Mahavira, and Buddhism, the teachings of the fifth-century BC Gautama Buddha, both questioned the polytheistic divinities and hierarchical social structure of Vedic traditionalists. For both religious teachers, enlightenment resulted from individual study. Jainist asceticism spread by mass education, while Buddhist thought was concentrated in monastic orders.

With the progressive expansion of Buddhism came the revival of Sanskrit – the language of the Vedic commentaries – as a learned lingua franca. The fusion of Buddhism and Vedic traditions around 1200 led to classical Hinduism, with three kinds of educational institution. First (and especially in northern India) were the Gurukula schools, small groups of pupils gathered around a private teacher; astronomy was part of the curriculum. Second were the Hindu temple schools of southern India, inspired by the Buddhist monastic seminaries and supported by land grants; natural sciences seem not to have figured in the syllabus, but because the temple schools had hospitals we may imagine that they incorporated medical instruction. Third were the agrahara centres designed to spread Brahmanic learning. These Hindu schools were pale reflections of the Buddhist colleges that had functioned within grand monasteries since the fifth century. Nalanda (located south of Patna in Bihar, eastern India), one of the most famous of these monasteries, had 10,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventh century; of these as many as 1500 were teachers and about one third were students. It was at Nalanda in the seventh century that the Chinese scholar I-hsing (672–717) copied 400 Sanskrit texts.

Natural sciences in South Asia found their firmest supporters not in schools, but in family-controlled guilds. Astronomical knowledge, for example, was a guild secret. The restricted nature of certain kinds of natural knowledge also coloured science instruction at Chinese colleges. Insofar as we have certain knowledge of them, Chinese institutions of higher learning may be traced to the philosophical schools formed at the time of the Warring States, from 475 BC to 221 BC, when kingdoms large and small contested for supremacy. Teachers were required to train and discipline a civilian bureaucracy, and states naturally competed to recruit teachers who could transform administrative norms into ethical principles. The resulting philosophical free-for-all is known as the time of the Hundred Schools. In terms of the multiplicity of sectarian doctrine, the Hundred Schools seem not unlike the late Hellenic period. A handful of the Hundred Schools survived a period of internecine warfare and continued to have an impact long into a time of imperial rule, indeed, up to the present: the Confucianists, the Legalists, the Mohists, the Taoists, the Logicians and the Naturalists.

The Confucianists, followers of Master Kung, held that virtue could be acquired by learning, although his disciples, from Mencius to Xun Zi, differed about how much education might do for people. Legalists, under Han Feizi, believed in the literal interpretation of legal canons and the inflexible application of jurisprudence, a procedure offered to make law both equitable and independent of executive privileges. Mohists, followers of Mo Zi, proclaimed a religious vision of love and encouraged technological improvements that would defend the weak against the strong. Taoists, tracing their origin to the teachings of Lao Zi, advocated the dissolution of reason in ascetic spirituality; their disengagement from the mechanism of statecraft translated into an antipathy for mechanical contrivance, but their quest for a state of grace led Taoists to experiment with therapeutic regimes for extending and improving life. Logicians, followers of Hui Shih and Kungsun Lung, emphasized a search for generalized concepts transcending the ephemeral particular. The Naturalists elaborated the theories of the two forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth), attributed to their master Tsou Yen; in contrast to the other schools, they actively sought to advise heads of state.

As in Hellenistic times with the schools of Athens, the Hundred Schools came together in a secular institution of higher learning, the Academy of the Gate of Chi, located in the capital of the State of Chhi. Founded by King Hsüan about 318 BC, and perhaps inspired by one of its fellows, the naturalist Tsou Yen, the academy assembled scholars of many persuasions and from diverse states. These included Taoists, Mohists, and the great Confucian scholar Mencius. Fellows wore special, flat caps and apparently had no obligations beyond advice-giving; they could aspire to the title of grand prefect.

The Academy of the Gate of Chi – the Chinese counterpart to the Museum of Alexandria – did not survive the imperial unification that ended the Warring States period. The grand victor, Chhin Shih Huang Ti, organized an imperial bureaucracy, brought the defeated aristocracy to heel at his court, expanded public works, maintained a large army, and engineered the great northern wall. As part of his codification of laws and rites, he ordered the destruction by burning of all books except his own archives and treatises on medicine, divination, and agriculture. Along with purging wrong words, the new potentate executed wrong-thinking scholars. Chhin Shih Huang Ti died about 210 BC, barely fifteen years after unifying China; his successor, a usurper son, lasted four years more before the Chhin empire (and its academy) dissolved in social disintegration and revolt.

Liu Pang, an escapee from death row, emerged from the ruins of the Chhin to found the Han empire in 202 BC. His dynasty invented ‘classical’ China. Genuine concern for preserving what the Chhin had condemned (and not entirely eradicated) is found in the establishment of an imperial school (Ta Hsüeh) in 124 BC, with various chairs (occupied by professors, po shih); its aim was to produce functionaries. The Han school produced scholars for the imperial regime, and they were selected by examination. Students received honorary titles commensurate with their test results; the best of them landed positions in the central bureaucracy. (The whole process was sped by the invention of paper, traditionally attributed to Tshai Lun late in the first century AD.) Various accounts describe an impressive campus, with entry restricted to the sons of noble or administrative families. Although students paid no fees, they were required upon arrival to offer gifts to their professors.

Buddhism made its appearance in China by the third century AD. Its ascetic and non-aggressive doctrine found popularity at the time of material dislocation surrounding the collapse of the Han empire into competing kingdoms. In disunited China there were significant attempts at promoting institutions of higher learning, but the instaurations all seem to resemble the various ephemeral and unsuccessful universities of medieval Europe. Around the beginning of the fifth century, for example, the Northern Wei established an imperial school in their capital; the name soon changed to the Central Book School, reflecting its concern with the Confucian classics, for which an anthology, or codex, had recently been prepared.

Chinese civilization emerged from divisions and rivalries to create a golden age under the autocratic Sui and then the Thang. About 583 the first Sui emperor, Wen Ti, revived the nobles’ school (Kuo Hsüeh), a school for meritorious commoners (T’ai Hsüeh), and a preparatory school (the Four Gates School), each of which had five professors; he also created for the first time a separate mathematics school with two professors. The purpose of higher education under the Thang was still to prepare students for a government position, and this could be attained by success in a national examination. An inflexible form of this system emerged much later, in the Yüan, when the mandarinate drew exclusively from students who had mastered the Confucian classics. The system did not entirely ignore natural knowledge (from the Thang onward there were separate mathematics examinations), but science undoubtedly constituted the lowest path to success.

A later Thang emperor, Hsüan Tsung, assembled an independent group of high officials to advise him in scholarly matters – the Hanlin (literally, ‘Forest of Pencils’). The Hanlin Academy, as it came to be called, emerged as the premier learned authority in China. Awarded the title of Learned Scholar in 738, Hanlin associates – men who were practical as well as erudite – became, by the middle of the century, China’s court society of government advisers. Hanlin academicians were charged with emending and authenticating the Confucian corpus that served as the basis of the civil-service examinations. By the Ming period, membership was an exclusive prerogative of senior and accomplished scholars. The Academy extended its authority straight through the Chhing (Manchu), and it expired only in 1911.

The Hanlin Academy regulated orthodox scholarship. Furthermore, the genre of scholarship to be regulated – the Confucian classics – offered scant place for treatises in natural knowledge. The Hanlin did, however, directly supervise an advanced imperial school, revived in the middle of the eighth century, and over the next five hundred years there are persistent intrusions of extra Confucian discourses into diverse state schools. In part this reflects the syncretic evolution of devotional thought, where Buddhist and Taoist notions were incorporated into Confucianism; in part it was a desire to train adepts in medicine, agriculture, and possibly also geography. The time of the Yüan, under the Mongols, again saw the introduction of foreign ideas, the expected result of an empire that stretched from Budapest to the Pacific Ocean. Interest in things Islamic continued with the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368. As Chinese traditions merged with those of the Mongols, it becomes appropriate to turn to the institutions of higher learning in medieval Islam.

Islam

A little more than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Muslim rule in the form of the caliphate (the successors of the prophet) extended from Samarqand to Barcelona, stopped only by the Byzantines and the Franks. After a century or so of imperial rule, the caliphate devolved into a number of autonomous kingdoms and regimes, the periphery seceding first, organized under a diverse spectrum of caliphs, sultans, maliks, emirs, wazirs, and so on. The notion of a pan-Islamic world survived internecine wars and foreign invasions. Islamic rights were not restricted by political regime, and they entailed no national citizenship. All Muslims were equal before Quranic law in any Muslim jurisdiction, and this equality received continual reinforcement from trade and from the experience of the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca made by pious Muslims.

Because there was no Islamic pope to decide doctrinal matters (and disputes about dogma precipitated a number of schisms beginning with the earliest caliphs), the teaching of Islamic law became a practical necessity. By the ninth century, nonresidential law schools, or masjids, retailing Islamic knowledge in the context of everyday problems, emerged in association with mosques in most large Islamic centres; students lived in khans, nonprofit Islamic hostels for pilgrims and transients. From the masjid and the khan came the madrasa, the signal educational institution of Islam. It dominated learned life from the end of the tenth century until the nineteenth century.

Masjids and madrasas owed their existence to the charitable donation, or waqf. The usual inspirations for charity – piety and pride – lie behind the endowment of madrasas, but Islamic law provided special encouragement for it. A waqf donation, made in person or in a will, circumvented the divisions of an estate among a man’s sons, which resulted in the dissolution of private fortunes. By analogy with today’s philanthropies, an Islamic waqf could prevent fortunes from being taxed. Furthermore, the donor exercised complete liberty about the conditions of his waqf, provided that he did not contravene Islamic law. He could, for example, purchase or construct an institution, endow it, install himself as director, and specify that direction pass to his descendants. The waqf was inviolate, and it could be broken only if its object was heretical or uncharitable. It comes as no surprise that breaking a waqf – like breaking a modern will – was a regular occurrence.

The madrasas were waqf-endowed colleges for Islamic wisdom, complete with buildings, libraries, curators, service staff, dormitories, and (one imagines) dining commons. Professors and fellows, appointed by terms of the waqf, taught students in numbers from a dozen to more than a hundred. The madrasas had no corporate identity beyond the terms of the waqf, however; Islamic law gave rights only to individuals. There were, then, no corporate diplomas. A disciple received a written commendation from an individual master, his madrasa professor. By implication, madrasas had no sinecures. A professor was paid not to write books, but rather to train students in the art of debating Islamic truth. If he had no students, he could not receive a waqf-endowed salary, and the exercise of dazzling rhetoric was the way to attract students away from hundreds of competing madrasas.

The individualistic approach to higher learning (the lack of which in modern universities educators so often decry) extended to the matter of documentation. A madrasa student aspired to a certificate of mastery signed by a professor. The competent authority – always a man – authorized the acolyte to teach law or issue legal opinions. This licence to teach was a unique development. The Islamic certification, it may be argued, is the origin of the facultas ubique docendi – the authorization to teach a particular subject anywhere – issued corporately by professors or by the church at the early Christian universities in Europe.

The madrasa curriculum generally excluded the so-called ancient sciences, the inheritance from the schools and museums of the Hellenistic-Roman world, which in the ninth century, under the patronage of caliphs Harun al-Rashid and especially al-Mamûn, had been translated into Arabic. The exclusion has been seen as a conservative rejection of heretical, or at least contentious, doctrines. Yet the madrasas do seem to have instituted just the method of disputation that dominated the Hellenistic schools, survived into the late medieval period at Constantinople, and formed the basis of scholarly interchange at Christian universities in medieval Europe. Despite contempt for and amusement directed at the ancients, classical works in science did not suffer the opprobrium of a universal ban. Students informally read treatises in natural science and medicine with madrasa professors. Twelfth-century Iberian-based Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in the Latin world as Averroës, is illustrative. A professor of Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote major treatises on astronomy and medicine. Although his philosophical works were anathematized and burned at Córdoba in Spain, his writings on the ancients suffered no indignities.

Law – whether natural, conventional, or supernatural – requires a record of opinions, and for this reason large libraries were also a familiar feature of the ninth-century Islamic world. The most famous of these was the Bayt al-Hikmah, or Hall of Wisdom, founded by the caliph al-Mamûm at Baghdad, but it was by no means the only one – in Baghdad or elsewhere. In antiquity and the medieval world, libraries were places for all activities related to books, whether reading, copying, or convening seminars and debates. A library in tenth-century Basra even had a professor-in-residence who gave courses. We see something of this tradition today in the broad sponsorship of cultural activities by the world’s great libraries. Influential scholars and historians of modern times – Lucien Herr and Philippe Ariès in Paris, George Sarton in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Daniel Boorstin in Washington, DC – published their work as associates of a library.

The Middle Ages

The thirteenth century, the century of great cathedral construction, was a time of unusual organizational ferment. One of its achievements was the emergence of modern universities. Over the preceding centuries, Christian Europe had been studying Roman law and wrestling with foreign wisdom, variously Byzantine and Arabic. Law became important as the Catholic church contested with civil authorities for control of temporal realms. Teachers of law and related matters – the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of the classical trivium – were in great demand at urban centres. There, overlapping and competing jurisdictions exerted by the church, nation, county, town, or guild, each with its rights and privileges, divided up the citizenry. At the same time cities stimulated the formation of groups of like-minded people into corporations with clearly defined responsibilities and fields of action. Students and masters of higher learning fell into line. They took the term universitas, a legal entity with powers extending beyond the individuals who composed it, much as other trades could have taken the term.

Universitas was at first always qualified to indicate whether the academic guild was one of students who named a rector (as at Bologna, Salamanca, Leipzig, the first Cracow university, or the law faculty at Montpellier and Prague), one of masters (as at Paris), or a power-sharing arrangement of students and masters together, as at Louvain. A large class of students were also masters, especially those in the higher, professional faculties who had completed a teaching licence in the lower arts faculty. (The system continues today in universities like Yale, where undergraduates are taught by graduate-student faculty, and in Oxford’s Christ Church college, where the masters are called ‘students’.)

Student-masters or the senior professors – the doctores – could hold courses under a wide range of institutional shelter. These shelters derived from the ‘nations’ – the protective associations for foreign students that were loosely affiliated with regional origins. By the late medieval period, the shelters were variously called fraternitates, societates, congregationes, corpora, paedagogia, contubernia, regentia, aula, collegia, or bursae; these fraternities, halls, and colleges had as principal or rector a master who was accredited by the university and was responsible for organizing instruction and overseeing living accommodation. In many cases the halls emerged as an act of charity with stipulations (regarding who might join, for example) reminiscent of stipulations involved in the Islamic charitable trusts that endowed madrasas. The system encouraged a division of the student body into hierarchies of wealth and privilege.

Universities, indeed, were confederations of constituencies – the faculties, the colleges, and all those from maids to apothecaries, copyists, stationers, and later book printers who came under academic protection. Students in many cases ran the show. In southern France, Iberia, and eastern Europe, students not infrequently controlled university offices, notably those of councillor and rector. At Bologna, the student nations had proctors, bursars, and beadles, and they managed considerable amounts of cash. Indeed, masters at Bologna and Padua (both institutions were known as students’ universities) organized into doctoral colleges just to defend their interests; in the Paris arts faculty, the masters controlled the nations – and their treasuries. The constituencies took diverse forms across Europe, but they were everywhere at the organizational centre of things. The familiar name of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, derives from a college founded by Robert of Sorbon (1201– 1274), royal chaplain and canon of Notre Dâme Cathedral.

The collegiate structure continued for a long time at a number of universities. The most famous examples are the colleges still at the base of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but colleges figure in the life of other universities as well, notably Pavia. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, Paris had ten residential colleges. The ambiguity attached to the word ‘college’ – certainly a learned connotation but otherwise unspecified with regard to level – persists up to our time. North-American colleges function variously as faculties or dormitories at universities, while in the Latin world a college is the usual designation for a secondary school. One of Montreal’s most distinguished private schools, Lower Canada College, now instructs a class of six-year-olds; Montreal’s most distinguished university, McGill, includes Victoria College, a women’s dormitory. In Paris and Mexico City there are national colleges with professors who devote most of their time to research. At Rome and Washington, special colleges convene from time to time to choose a new pope or president. In all these instances we find the notion of a common pursuit.

The waning of the Middle Ages led to vesting ultimate academic authority in the faculties on the one hand, and to a levelling of the student body on the other hand. The masters appropriated the collegiate model for their own ends. But the medieval legacy is not hard to spot today. In addition to faculty senates and directors of residential life, we have university fraternities and privately endowed student societies, residential colleges and dining clubs, concessions (bookstores, presses, tailors), and a bewildering hierarchy of professional bargaining units – trade unions of professors, teaching assistants, janitors, and cafeteria workers.

The greatest medieval legacy is that of academic freedom – and not merely for the masters. Medieval students enjoyed considerable privileges. These sometimes included the right to strike as well as protection against cruel and unusual treatment by civil authorities. The privileges were eroded when, over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the masters claimed control of corporative activity, but certain student rights have persisted into the modern world. At some universities today, students exercise a decisive role in the choice of new professors, in matters of professional promotion, and in curriculum reform. Universities continue to discipline members of their own corporation. Even institutions that bear little resemblance to medieval guilds – certain state or provincial universities in North America – tread carefully around the matter of allowing municipal police or soldiers on their campus.

Following the model of early thirteenth-century Paris, law, theology, and medicine were the recognized ‘higher faculties’; arts, the fourth faculty, was a grab-bag of skills deemed preparatory for professional careers. The object of university study was to acquire knowledge and be able to teach it, and the course of study was open to any qualified person – that is, any man of the right faith and class. Although the medieval university was a fast track to the three professional guilds, it did not directly prepare students for earning a living productively. There were, it is significant to note, no faculties of engineering, architecture, navigation, or commerce.

By the late medieval period, European Christian universities issued various certificates: the baccalaureate, for competence in teaching certain subjects under supervision; and a master’s or doctorate, awarded after a public examination, for admission to the corps of masters. These diplomas persist to our own time, albeit with modifications. German university faculties came to offer, by the eighteenth century, only a doctorate, by which time Oxford and Cambridge awarded, as earned degrees, little beyond a bachelor’s. (The nineteenth-century honours degree at Cambridge was held to be equivalent to a German DPhil, according to the polymath John Theodore Merz [1860–1922], who had intimate experience with both systems.² ) In all cases the diploma signified that the holder came from a background of wealth and ease, and it augured (but did not promise) a career in law, medicine, one or another church, or government.

The universities functioned until the eighteenth century in the absence of a coherent system of secondary education, although something in this line came to be provided by Jesuit colleges and English public schools, among other institutions. For this reason the lower faculties – arts (frequently divided later into letters and sciences) or in Northern Europe, philosophy – continued to provide basic, or remedial, services. Professors of many sciences, then, were from the beginning under continual pressure to lecture far below the level of the research front. The pattern persists to the present day. Medical students learn about the latest diseases, drugs, and instruments; prospective lawyers study last year’s legal opinions; future theologians receive the party line from clerical conclaves. But a great many science students never get beyond rational mechanics of the Baroque and thermodynamics of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

This is not to say that research into natural phenomena and laws did not occur at universities. Medieval university philosophers at Paris, Oxford, Valladolid, Cracow, and elsewhere laboured to elaborate Aristotelian notions of motion, both terrestrial and celestial, as well as Galenic medicine – for these pagan texts had been translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin by the thirteenth century. Investigators committed to understanding the laws of the world including Nicole Oresme (ca.1320–1382), John Buridan (ca.1295– ca.1358), Albertus Magnus (ca.1200–1280), and Roger Bacon (ca.1219–ca.1292) all taught at universities for longer or shorter periods of time. Then as now, however, a professor’s freedom to navigate by his conscience depended on the secular and ecclesiastical winds, even after medieval universities acquired self-policing statutes.

A central paradox of institutions of higher learning has always been their vulnerability to ideological or political repression. The burning of academic libraries in classical antiquity and medieval Islam is exactly matched by conflagrations over the past five generations – at Strasbourg, Louvain, Madrid, Königsberg, Tokyo, Beirut, and Kuwait. The condemnation in 1927 of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti by officers of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a cause célèbre of the 1920s, echoes the condemnation of the subversive Joan of Arc by the University of Paris.

Universities do not make society. They teach what people want to learn, and they give voice to what people prefer to hear. But because they are keepers of tradition and accumulated wisdom, their response time is slow. This allows universities to become authorities for what we know. Relative isolation from prosaic concerns provides a unique environment for encouraging new knowledge about the world. The tension between tradition and innovation is a fundamental characteristic of the European university, and it is central to the enterprise of modern science.

2 Teaching: From the Time of the Scientific Revolution

Henry Adams, who as a Harvard University professor brought the history seminar to North America from Germany, pondered a thousand years of European culture and proposed, early in the twentieth century, laws for what he saw. In his view, the civilization of western Europe had reached a crisis, as the foundations of medieval faith sank into the shifting sands of technological change. Changes occurred at an ever increasing pace. Knowledge grew and events accelerated. Even with the finest tutors, a person could not keep up with all that was new. Cast adrift in the modern age, Adams dropped his anchor at the cathedral of Chartres, France. From this mooring, he reckoned the meaning of the world, and he calculated its demise in the year 1921. Adams (1838–1918) lived almost from the advent of electromagnetism through the observational verifications of general relativity; he himself measured his life by the technological inventions that he had experienced. He called himself a child of the eighteenth century who struggled to come to terms with the twentieth.

The literate speculations of Henry Adams – who contemplated regularities in the development of Western culture – spawned scientometrics, the science of measuring science. Derek de Solla Price, a firm advocate of the new science who found inspiration in Henry Adams, proposed that the rate of scientific change, however one measured the rate, obeyed a law first formulated by Alfred Lotka (1880–1949). The number of discoveries, periodicals, pages of print, individual researchers, and so on, all grow exponentially for a time until the growth levels off at a plateau. This S-shaped curve, in Price’s view, reflected a basic fact of civilization.

The take-off point for Price’s exponential curves occurred around 1650. At this time, the institutions of science – whether educational facilities, scientific societies, or scientific journals – blossomed. A host of new ideas, from the heliocentric universe to the circulation of the blood, shook the foundations of Western thinking about the natural world. This constellation of institutional and intellectual factors has been called the Scientific Revolution, a term that describes a period of rapid and radical change.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed to a considerable extent outside the universities, which were bastions of scholasticism and Aristotelian thought. When the Catholic canon Nicholas Copernicus’s (1473–1543) book on the revolutions of the heavens appeared in 1543, universities could trace their traditions and prerogatives back more than three centuries. Yet a large percentage of contributors to the new natural philosophy (however it may be defined) were employed by universities, and by far the majority were university alumni. Over the latter half of the sixteenth century, university lecturers at Wittenberg (Georg Joachim Rheticus [1514–1574] and his colleagues Erasmus Reinhold [1511–1553] and Kaspar Peucer [1525–1602]), Tübingen (Michael Maestlin [1550–1631]), Oxford (Henry Savile [1546–1604]), and possibly Cambridge (Henry Briggs [1561–1630]) constructively criticized and otherwise promoted Copernicanism. Salamanca permitted, by statute, Copernicus’s thought to be taught. Although by 1600 only a dozen men had lined up solidly behind heliocentrism, the new doctrine was widely disseminated at various universities.

Without labouring the point, it is well to mention some among the architects of the Scientific Revolution with significant university connections. Copernicus attended universities at Crakow, Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara; in Italy he studied medicine and canon law. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) learned medicine at Louvain and Paris and then taught surgery and anatomy at Padua. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) went to Pisa for medicine and then at the end of the sixteenth century taught mathematics at Pisa and Padua. William Harvey (1578–1657) studied medicine at Cambridge and Padua. René Descartes (1596–1650) received instruction in (among other things) Galileo’s telescopic discoveries from the Jesuits at La Flèche and read law at Poitiers. Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) attended the University of Leiden. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) went to Leipzig, Jena, and Altdorf (where he took a doctorate). Isaac Newton (1642–1727) took a BA at Cambridge and then became Lucasian professor there. Their innate conservatism notwithstanding, universities have indeed served as crucibles for new ideas in natural knowledge.

As the example of Newton indicates, the universities did respond to the ‘new science’. Experimental and mathematical natural philosophy at once transcended and underlay the professional interests of the three traditional, higher faculties. The faculties of arts and sciences (or as they were known in northern Europe, faculties of philosophy) were the natural home for this learning, for they had long harboured professors of astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics. Furthermore, by the sixteenth century, schools to prepare students for the university assumed increasing importance, building on a tradition found in several of the medieval English Public Schools (Winchester and Eton) and the Dutch teaching order known as the Brothers of the Common Life. In St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, the Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, and Harrow (all sixteenth-century English creations), and in the profusion of Jesuit colleges in Western Europe generally, adolescents could acquire the basic skills – languages and mathematics – that had previously been retained by university professors of the liberal arts. This preparation freed at least some arts-and-sciences professors from elementary instruction and allowed them to spend more time on the latest word. Clever professors in Italy, the Netherlands, and Germanic Europe were increasingly able to transmit the news and add to their income by attracting interested students. Since the seventeenth century, the prestige of a university has related to the situation of its professors on the research front.

The liberation of natural philosophers in the universities is not unrelated to a general climate of tolerance for diverse religions and credos. This openness governed the golden age of the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), offering a haven to giants like René Descartes and Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677). Dutch universities were much frequented by foreigners, notably the British, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, Leiden featured an unusually strong corps of science professors, including Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande (1688–1742), and Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692–1761, originator in 1746 of the electrical capacitor known as the Leiden jar). The brilliant Dutch expositors of experimental science had at their command the unparalleled Dutch instrument trade. They were stimulated by the daily arrival of colonial exotica on the one hand and the deadly struggle against the North Sea on the other hand. In their hands, the dissertation for the doctorate became what it is today – a passport in the world of science. Indeed, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the Dutch doctoral dissertation – much longer than its German or French counterparts – has set the standard for the unwieldy tomes that now issue from the hands of aspiring scholars around the world.

An atmosphere of tolerance also characterized late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Scotland. There, as in the Netherlands (and unlike in England, France, or Spain), a student’s religious views were his own business; and like the Netherlands, Scotland enjoyed close contacts with both Lutheran Germany and Catholic France. Aberdeen, Glasgow, and especially Edinburgh cultivated mighty traditions in medicine and natural philosophy. James Gregory (1638–1675) and Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), prominent Newtonians, taught at Edinburgh, as did the three anatomists called Alexander Monro (father, son, and grandson). Monro primus’s physician father had studied at Leiden where he formed a friendship with fellow student Boerhaave. Monro primus (1697–1767) cultivated the friendship and brought Edinburgh to rival Boerhaave’s Leiden as a medical school. Chemists William Cullen (1710–1790) and Joseph Black (1728–1799) both taught at Glasgow and ended up at Edinburgh. By the middle of the eighteenth century Edinburgh and Glasgow variously featured David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790). The glow of a Scottish scientific education lasted through the nineteenth century – the tenures at Glasgow and Edinburgh of physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) and physician Joseph, Lord Lister (1827–1912) reflect the brilliance of eighteenth-century predecessors. English speakers from the time of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) have gone down to Oxbridge to make social connections and up to Scotland to learn the sciences that were ancillary to medicine.

Autocratic theocracies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France and Spain, did not encourage freedom of thought in independent academic institutions that might ultimately threaten their own stability. The seventy-odd educational institutions of higher learning in French and Spanish lands (adding in engineering and mining schools as well as large colleges to the list of ‘universities’, properly speaking) did not blaze with scientific learning. In France, the universities receded before large establishments for scientific research created by royal patronage: the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Paris Observatory in the seventeenth century and their eighteenth-century offspring, the Paris botanical gardens and the natural history museum. Spain did not see comparable royal research institutions until the mid eighteenth century, and by then there were not many of them (notably the Madrid and Cadiz observatories and the Barcelona Academy of Sciences), but it maintained a string of institutions of higher learning in its colonial possessions.

The rise of the German university

Scottish universities possessed drawing power and brilliant professors; Dutch universities had these attributes as well as a tradition of publishing science doctorates. German universities were something of a question mark. ‘The total annual matriculations in the German universities averaged 4200 from 1700 to 1750,’ writes historian of science John Heilbron, ‘and then declined almost linearly to about 2900 in 1800.’¹ Why, then, do we associate the modern research university with Germany?

Part of the answer relates to a medieval and Renaissance heritage that left Germany with a large number of institutions of higher learning. In the eighteenth century there were four times as many German-language universities as Dutch (five) and Scottish (four) together. The smallest of the German universities, Herborn and Duisburg, shrank to virtual extinction (sixty and eighty students respectively), but nearly all of them awarded a philosophical doctorate. German professors had their hand in scientific research from the very advent of printing, around 1450, and in old-style Jesuit universities and colleges (where philosophy still preceded professional studies), there was adequate employment for science researchers.

Part of the answer relates to historical accident. Only three Dutch universities (plus Louvain and Ghent, which the Netherlands lost to Belgium in 1832) survived the Napoleonic interregnum; it was not until after the middle of the nineteenth century that Leiden and Utrecht began to benefit again from Dutch colonial prosperity. Then, too, the Scottish medical faculties overwhelmed arts and sciences, which never succeeded in organizing a doctoral programme. Some of these conditions also applied to Germany, of course, which lost a good number of universities to Napoleonic reorganization. But eighteenth-century Germany nevertheless pioneered a new kind of university, where priority went to the philosophy faculty, and this is the image we see everywhere today, when we are accustomed to ‘doctor of philosophy’ degrees in such unphilosophical subjects as nursing, engineering, and agriculture.

The German universities benefited from competition among the various German states in attracting students and generally building up academic prestige. The dominant late seventeenth-century universities were at Leipzig (belonging to Saxony) and Jena (belonging to Weimar). Prussia then founded Halle in 1694 to siphon off talent from nearby institutions. Hannover founded Göttingen in 1737 to remove the shine from Halle. Maria Theresa revived the moribund universities under Austrian care beginning in the 1750s, banishing Aristotelian scholasticism in favour of experimental physics; her reorganization affected Freiburg im Breisgau, Graz, Innsbruck, Prague, and Vienna, and it had a notable impact on collegiate-structured Pavia, in Austrian Italy. To make their mark, these new universities were charged by their state to teach and inspire by propagating and contributing to the stock of knowledge. This notion appeared early in the eighteenth century under the Leibnizian natural philosopher Christian Freiherr von Wolff (1697–1754), who lectured and wrote from Halle and Marburg, consulted widely across Europe, and turned down a dozen or so university calls.

Emphasizing research in a teaching climate followed the rationalist precepts that had taken Europe by storm in the seventeenth century – notably those of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. Uniting research with teaching fitted well with the emphasis on facts and experience that radiated from the writings of the foremost proponent of the new science, Francis Bacon. For the most part the innovation occurred earliest in universities without a medieval pedigree. The receptivity of institutions to change is related inversely to their entrenched traditions.

The professorial research function was opposed by privileged members of scientific societies, who received state emoluments for innovating without having to lecture. But the new style universities were adamant about encouraging research, and they made producing new knowledge a condition of professorial appointment, as, for example, with Johann Tobias Mayer’s (1723–1762) chair of physics at Göttingen in 1750. The condition extended to all fields of learning, and universities that ignored it – for example Basle, which at the time chose professors by lot from a slate of three men who usually belonged to the local patriciate – did so at their peril. It gave rise especially to the earliest institutional union of research and teaching known as the philological seminar.

The eighteenth-century university seminar was a key development, and it emerged from the discipline of comparative philology. Two hundred years of European expansion had stockpiled an astonishing variety of tongues. The literature in some of these was sophisticated and not completely foreign to European minds. Sanskrit – the Latin of India – found great appeal among scholars at the new universities, who set out to relate it to everything else they knew, dead or alive. The puzzle had endless parts, each one of which was ideally suited for a doctoral dissertation. The programme demanded specialized libraries, which would be increased from one generation to the next; it required a home and a budget, which university authorities then (no different from now) grudgingly provided. The doctoral seminar was thus born in a room surrounded by dictionaries and reference works. It has remained there ever since.

The doctoral seminar did not extend easily to France.

Napoleonic Europe, focusing on grand state institutions, was no friend of independent corporations with a royalist heritage. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon created a score of pyramidal educational authorities, each one consisting of faculties, lycées, and elementary schools, all ultimately responsible to functionaries in Paris. This University of France continued through the nineteenth century, recruiting teenagers to become schoolteachers and, later in the century, becoming a motor of regional economic growth. Higher scientific learning was transmitted in special grandes écoles outside the university. The most important of these early in the century was the Ecole Polytechnique, governed then (as now) by the Ministry of War and designed to produce military engineers. There was also the Ecole Normal Supérieure, the national school that set norms for schoolteachers, which at mid century, under the inspired direction of Louis Pasteur, became a privileged conduit to a scientific career. By the twentieth century there were a score of these grandes écoles, which recruited by competition and which promised graduates a civil-service posting in diverse technical fields. The French universities have never received their place in science, but a comeback of sorts was made at the end of the nineteenth century in direct response to developments outre-Rhin.

Beyond the borders of France, Napoleon engineered the end of a number of universities in the Netherlands and German-speaking Europe. German rulers used the occasion of their new independence to open new universities in propitious administrative seats like Berlin, Breslau, Bonn, and eventually Munich. The notion of pure learning, or Wissenschaft (a neologism from the German Enlightenment intended to denote scholarship and science), lay at the centre of the reorganized and the new universities, especially in Prussia. The research spirit permeated the University of Berlin, created in 1810 with the guidance of historian Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Over the next generation research became a way of life for German university professors, as councillors of the various kings, princes, dukes, following a long tradition, competed for prominent men of science.

The German research university in context

The research ethos, already displayed at the larger eighteenth-century German universities, became rooted in nineteenth-century academic life. Germans believed, along with the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), that the promotion of culture through education was the path to national regeneration. Eighteenth-century courtly life, lacking the means to indulge in the profligate dissipation that characterized Paris and London, was nothing if not intellectual. The courtly ideal of Bildung – an appreciation of the world combined with self-realization – was achieved by serious study.

Education became a German passion early in the nineteenth century, and the university reforms were connected with a new system of primary and secondary schools. The guiding light for educational curricula was a romantic invocation of classical antiquity which was known as neohumanism. The path to Bildung, then, required a large detour through Greek and Latin, the knowledge of which (attested by a diploma, the Abitur, issued by a classical secondary school, the Gymnasium) was held to be a prerequisite for study in any university faculty. This much was also true of French and English education, although to a lesser degree. The signal characteristic of the German educational synthesis lay in grafting research on Bildung.

Accomplishment in research, certified especially by having received a doctorate from a philosophy faculty, signalled that a man was the right sort for instructing German youth. By extension, the battery of examinations instituted to certify young men as customs agents, mine inspectors, and Gymnasium teachers went far beyond the practical knowledge necessary for the job. Gymnasium mathematics teachers, for example, had to acquit themselves in many subjects not taught in the secondary schools, such as celestial mechanics. The requirement is less bizarre when it is recalled that the examiners for civil-service ratings were university professors, whose material interests included persuading future civil servants to attend their rather arcane – not to say useless – lectures. In this way, professors circumvented the inconvenient tradition by which philosophy faculties awarded no diploma except the doctorate; the civil-service rating examinations defined a kind of undergraduate degree (comparable to the licence in France or the ordinary BA at a Scottish or English university).

Bildung, like Wissenschaft, was practically irrelevant. A cultivated person was unprepared for greasing the wheels of commerce and industry, just as a master of Wissenschaft had no sense of how to turn his knowledge to lucrative gain. University learning, at least in the philosophy faculties, was intentionally abstract. As the German states required engineers and manufacturers, notably for their armies, they looked to France and adapted her solution. They set up civilian copies of the Ecole Polytechnique. By mid century these schools evolved into institutes of technology, independent of universities, called technische Hochschulen. Although these institutes did not create the German industrial revolution of steel, chemicals, and electricity (sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution), they provided thousands of unusually well-prepared engineers (among them Albert Einstein’s uncle, Jakob Einstein [1850–1912]) who stewarded the revolution into the twentieth-century age of gigantic industrial firms.

Institute professors, like those who taught Albert Einstein in Zurich, were infected with the research ethos of their university counterparts. Publishing brilliant work was one way to move up from institute to university, a common career move for many scientists (Einstein bucked the trend, resigning a professorship at the German University of Prague for one at the Zurich Institute of Technology). An institute diploma, however, had nothing of the cachet of a university doctorate. The Zurich Institute of Technology in fact had a special arrangement with the local university, whereby institute alumni could become university doctoral candidates (Einstein twice failed to obtain a doctorate in this way). The engineers clamoured for parity with university graduates to achieve respect at dinner parties and to obtain state privileges bestowed on cultured university alumni. This they progressively (and slowly) achieved. The right to award a doctorate of engineering came in 1900, and more than fifty years later came the honour of calling themselves technische Universitäten.

In the nineteenth century, German education was generally a battleground between practical studies, or Realen, and impractical Wissenschaft. Chemistry provided the first demonstration that pure learning, left to its own devices, could turn a profit. The demonstrator was Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), who mass-produced chemists from his laboratory at Giessen. He revived the felicitous notion that certain kinds of science, especially chemistry, were teachable less by magisterial lectures than by hands-on experience. He expanded on the lecture-demonstrations of the Enlightenment by extending to natural sciences what had been common for Sanskritists or Provençalists – the seminar. Liebig’s students, at first instructed in his home, were largely apothecaries. He taught a technique, synthesizing chemical compounds, that could apply to all nature. He retailed the technique with a goal that no government could dispute, increasing agricultural production. State authorities showered riches on him: a title of nobility and a well-appointed laboratory for teaching and research. The disciples of organic chemistry established themselves across Germany when the great boom of synthetic dyes began, guaranteeing the discipline an independent home in the philosophy faculties. We shall see later that a similar evolution characterized nineteenth-century physics.

The idealism of the Gymnasium movement did not completely extinguish an eighteenth-century emphasis on secondary instruction in Realen – notably modern languages and mathematics. Municipalities and occasionally states also sponsored a variety of trade and commercial schools designed for people who could not afford the luxury of higher learning. Following a natural tendency among academic institutions to seek greater privileges for their graduates, some of the trade schools developed a curriculum and a diploma to rival the Abitur. These advanced trade schools took the name Oberrealschule, and their graduates (having learned French and English in place of Greek and Latin) could go on to study at the technischen Hochschulen. To satisfy practical students who wanted a bit of classical gloss, as well as impractical students disabused of the significance of Greek for modern times, a third school emerged at mid century, the Realgymnasium, which offered Latin and modern languages and whose diploma (after much soul-searching on the part of university professors) allowed entry to certain professional studies.

The absurdity of preventing future organic chemists from learning modern languages and advanced mathematics before the age of nineteen continued to the very beginning of the twentieth century, when the privileges of the Abitur (including university entry and preferential treatment generally by the state bureaucracies, including the army) extended to graduates of all three kinds of secondary school. But the prestige and unifying force of Gymnasium education – experienced by everyone from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to Otto von Bismarck and Max Planck (1858–1947) – has continued to the present day.

The reputation of the Gymnasium, the great scientific engine of the doctorate of philosophy, the vaunted emphasis upon professorial research, the fabled encouragement of independent thought – all these things produced imitators and adaptations around the world. Not everyone, however, accepted the German model uncritically. Boston’s Henry Adams graduated from Harvard University in 1858 and headed for Berlin. He found the university law lectures there depressing and useless. To work up facility in German, he then spent a number of months as a special student with thirteen-year-olds at a Berlin Gymnasium. Of this experience he recalled half a century later:

The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient.²

That inhuman efficiency, flying the colours of neohumanism, found many theatres of operation over the next century.

The Gymnasium also had unabashed admirers. One of the most illuminating accounts of science at nineteenth-century German universities comes from John Theodore Merz, the British-born and German-educated entrepreneurial and intellectual wonder. He recalls of his Gymnasium days in Darmstadt during the 1850s:

All my teachers, with perhaps one exception, were, in my opinion, very superior and earnest-minded men, who performed their duties very conscientiously and certainly did not shirk work. They expected the same from the boys, and I believe succeeded largely in securing this. I remember only few instances of serious punishments either for laziness, insubordination, or untruthfulness. Only twice during the six years of my attendance was a boy caned before the class for telling an untruth.

Merz, a polymath in an age of specialization, flourished in Darmstadt’s neohumanism. Latin and Greek poetry,

which we were expected to commit to memory, made the greatest impression on me, and I learnt many passages and whole poems without any special effort simply by hearing them read and repeating them to myself. Many of them I have carried with me through my whole life, and they have been sources of great enjoyment to me in lonely hours.³

The nineteenth-century German university is known for its principles of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit – the freedom of staff to teach whatever they liked and the freedom of students to attend any course they desired. Tenured instructors called Privatdozenten (because their income derived only from student fees, not state salaries) did indeed lecture on subjects of arcane interest (Merz attracted an audience of three when he was a Privatdozent at Bonn). Though salaried professors could do the same, they generally gave large introductory lectures to supplement their income. Students moved freely from one university to another and attended lectures ranging from philosophy to physics. A doctor of philosophy could apply to become a Privatdozent. This process of Habilitation meant submitting a dissertation for the right to teach, the venia legendi of medieval origin that allowed a professor to teach at any institution of higher learning. University faculties, controlled by tenured professors, were naturally extremely careful not to dilute their ranks (and their earning power) with a large number of Privatdozenten.

Rules were meant to be broken. The venia legendi could be revoked by the corporation (the university faculty) that issued it. From time to time professors and Privatdozenten were unceremoniously dumped as political or social liabilities. The most famous of these were the Göttingen Seven, removed from their posts in 1837 for associating themselves with political reform, although other causes célèbres included the exclusion of physics Privatdozent Leo Arons (b. 1860) from Berlin in 1898 for his membership in the Social-Democratic Party and the firing of Berlin physiology professor Georg Friedrich Nicolai (1874–1964) for his pacifist activity during the First World War.

Despite the refrain of academic freedom that resounded everywhere in Germany before 1933, university lecturers, much less professors, had to be the right sort of people. Jews, as Max Weber (1864–1920) noted, might take their cue from the motto written over the gates to Dante’s hell (‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’), but they became part of academia anyway. Women, although by the twentieth century not formally excluded, were almost completely absent as German university professors. This situation was not unusual in western, continental Europe, where women professors were phenomena. Physicist Marie CurieSklodowska (1867–1934), one of only two women professors at the Sorbonne before 1940 (the other was the organic chemist Pauline Ramart-Lucas [1880–1953]), obtained an appointment as a foreign-born, Nobel laureate, professor’s widow; Emmy Noether (1882–1935, daughter of a university mathematics professor) taught mathematics at Göttingen during the First World War only because most young men were serving as soldiers. Discrimination extended to neighbouring lands. In the Netherlands, where women had been earning medical diplomas since the middle of the nineteenth century, the first woman university professor did not begin lecturing until 1917. She was Johanna Westerdijk (1883–1961), who occupied the chair of plant pathology at the University of Utrecht with great distinction.

More significant exceptions to this situation are found beyond the western part of continental Europe. By the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, the Russian-speaking and the English-speaking worlds had created separate, university-grade colleges for women – complete with women professors. St Petersburg featured a women’s university, a women’s medical faculty, and a women’s normal school, all with women science professors. Barnard (at New York’s Columbia University) and Radcliffe (at Harvard University) followed the model of women’s colleges at Cambridge; colleges like Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Vassar, founded independently of male institutions and staffed largely by women, offered advanced degrees; and around 1900 coeducational sectarian colleges such as Oberlin, as well as a host of universities from Sydney to Manchester, signed on women as lecturers of various sorts.

Universities elsewhere

During the Third Republic, from 1871 to 1940, French administrators tried to borrow features of the German universities. Of all nations they were slowest to make the desired improvements, the research doctorate firmly establishing itself in France only in the late 1920s. But what of laissez-faire England?

For nearly two generations, the Scottish pressure valve accommodated the enormous demands for scientific education which had been generated by the First Industrial Revolution of steam, coal, iron, and textiles. The valve became insufficient by the 1820s, when Oxford and Cambridge still discouraged entry from religious nonconformists (the last of the religious ‘tests’, required for obtaining a diploma, were swept away only in 1871) and offered nothing approximating advanced scientific or even medical instruction. The reform of British education occurred over the middle quarters of the century. Generations after dissenters had established schools for languages and science outside the pale of the Church of England, English Public Schools were renovated with French, German, and mathematics under remarkable headmasters like Shrewsbury’s Benjamin Hall Kennedy (1804–1889), Charterhouse’s William Haig Brown (1823–1907), and Rugby’s Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), the father of poet Matthew Arnold.

Early in the nineteenth century London was a bit like Prussia’s Berlin had been: a seat of government without a university. Unlike Berlin, London generated scientific colleges piecemeal. The Benthamite-inspired University College founded in 1828 and the establishment King’s College in 1830 eventually became the larger installations of a huge organization, the University of London, which countersigned diplomas (by examination) at many domestic and colonial locations. London colleges offering scientific and technical instruction multiplied: the Royal College of Chemistry (founded in 1845 by students of Justus von Liebig), the Royal School of Mines (founded in 1851 along the model of the Ecole des Mines in Paris), and the City and Guilds of London Institute (founded in 1878 and located in the storied, sixteenth-century Gresham College).

The earliest of the so-called ‘red-brick’ universities in England’s industrial north also grew by collegial accretion. Durham revived its Cromwellian university in 1832, added a college for physical science at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (of which John Theodore Merz was for many years the guiding spirit) and a medical school, and then picked up affiliated colleges in places such as Barbados (Codrington) and Sierra Leone (Fourah Bay). Manchester, growing from Owens College to a university in 1877, had within its orbit colleges at Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield, although these branches declared institutional independence within a generation. University affiliations were marks of prestige and avenues to power at a time when the old Scottish and English universities sent members to Parliament and enjoyed the privilege of conducting courts of common law with the prerogative of imprisoning women for morals offences.

The prosecution of research in English universities was something of an inconsistent accident: Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory rising to world prominence under its first four directors (James Clerk Maxwell [1831–1879], John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh [1842–1919], Sir Joseph John Thomson [1856–1940], Ernest, Lord Rutherford [1871–1937]) and Oxford’s magnificently appointed Clarendon Laboratory (founded with money originally willed for a hippodrome) sinking into desuetude under its fainéant directors Ralph Bellamy Clifton (1836–1921) and Frederick Alexander Lindemann (1886–1957). To a certain extent science in England lived vicariously from imperial recruits, Rutherford’s trajectory (from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Cambridge to Montreal to Manchester and back triumphantly to Cambridge) being a paradigmatic illustration. Before 1918 the preparation of scientists did not generally include a doctorate, the British having marked this diploma (as the Russians also reserved it) as a laudeo for illustrious professors. (Rutherford’s DSc came courtesy of McGill University after he had been appointed Second Macdonald Professor of Physics there.)

Unlike England and France, the United States responded with enthusiasm to notions Germanic. Early in the nineteenth century the new nation had religiously-affiliated colleges of the English kind, public universities financed by individual states, and a diverse collection of privately endowed institutions of higher learning – there being generally no governmental restrictions on recognizing institutions that variously styled themselves colleges, academies, and high schools. There was, indeed, no clear distinction between secondary education and higher learning, high-school and college diplomas being roughly equal in number across the nineteenth century. Americans adopted French engineering schools as soon as the Germans did, and with more felicitous results. Until 1850 science was best acquired at the West Point military academy and at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, both modelled on the Ecole Polytechnique. Diverse polytechnics since then, such as the Massachusetts and California institutes of technology, Case, Carnegie, Armour, Rice, Stevens, and Drexel, established themselves as temples of science and technology, the Americans never having separated (as the Germans, the French, and the English separated them) the two distinct traditions.

About 1870 a number of high-minded American educators introduced the German philosophy doctorate under its Latin cognomen (Philosophiae Doctor, or PhD), even though not one of them oversaw an institution with a philosophy faculty. The innovation spread through refurbished religious institutions, like Yale and Harvard, older private institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, state universities like the ones at Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Madison, and newly endowed institutions of learning like Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, and Stanford. When universities like Princeton and Duke upgraded themselves, they expanded in the direction of ‘graduate’ studies. To distinguish the research function from the usual propaedeutic mandate, American universities invented the ‘Graduate School’ as one of their constituent divisions.

In Europe the university was a corporate entity with state prerogatives – a guild structure – rather than a self-contained and contiguous physical plant. Sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century transplants in places like Santo Domingo, Quito, Puebla, and Manila followed the European model, lodging professors and students wherever room could be found in the neighbourhood of ecclesiastical monuments. Although certain private corporations continued the European pattern (notably in dense, urban settings like Philadelphia and New York), by the eighteenth century, the colleges and universities erected beyond Europe had made use of their greatest asset – land – as a privileged domain. The university campus proliferated. The College of William and Mary is emblematic. It is situated at one point of an isosceles triangle, the other apexes being the colonial Virginia legislature (House of Burgesses) and the governor’s residence. The granting of land has subsequently figured in the foundation of new universities, and even the Europeans came to embrace the principle. The finest extended example of nineteenth-century German academic architecture, in fact, is the splendid campus of the Université Louis Pasteur, erected as an imperial German university at Strasbourg shortly after the Germans conquered Alsace in 1871.

The nineteenth-century campus was designed as a bucolic retreat, incorporating sylvan glens, conspicuously vacant fields, and arboreta, all of which might be seen as compensation for the lack of state privileges. As science helped to propel the Second Industrial Revolution, scientists were able to withdraw into specially constructed temples of limestone or marble in pristine settings.

Whether on or off a campus, specially designed research laboratories graced universities for the first time during the latter part of the nineteenth century. At the beginning, form was everything – allusions on the building’s portals reminding immature minds about the long tradition of science and the great power it represented. By the last quarter of the century, form was only skin deep. Science laboratories circled around large lecture halls for elementary courses (especially the ones frequented by medical students, who by 1880 were often required to go outside their faculty to learn about physics). Next to the lecture halls was an array of teaching laboratories, special halls for diverse kinds of professorial research (including massive stone plinths set independently of the building’s foundations to provide vibration-free working surfaces), rooms for housing steam and electrical generators, and seminar rooms and libraries. Larger physics institutes like the one at Berlin, inaugurated in 1877 on piers driven into a canal, had apartments for the director (Hermann von Helmholtz [1821–1894]) and his family, the assistants, and the maintenance staff of mechanics and maids. Like the one at Berlin, enormous structures arose at Leipzig and Zurich – veritable kingdoms under the command of a director. European institutes – massive, multistoried structures with several wings – dwarfed older academic buildings. The specialized laboratories eclipsed even the jewel of humanists, the library. Harvard’s Widener Library, the world’s largest university-owned book repository at its dedication in 1915 and an imposing memorial to a young man who went down with the Titanic, was not a great deal bigger than the Berlin physics institute.

By the end of the nineteenth century, nation states were bankrolling prestigious empires of science at independently administered universities (or, in France, at grandes écoles). Bureaucratic response followed swiftly: the state constructed its own scientific laboratories and funded them even more handsomely. Some scientists abandoned universities for the new settings (Helmholtz’s presidency of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt represented the leading edge of the new wave), but most sat on the fence between the traditional prestige (and independence) of a university position and the vast resources (with strings attached) of the new federal research centres. The usual arrangement was to divide time between (and accumulate emoluments from) university and state laboratory. A clever scientist could play off each patron against its competitor. This is what Albert Einstein did when he went to Berlin in 1914. Appointed to a salaried chair at the Academy of Sciences (positions in the same vein had been funded by the academy for many years), he received a courtesy appointment at the local university (allowing him to supervise doctoral students) and a titular directorship of an institute for theoretical physics in the federal laboratory structure known as the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft. Einstein used the academy position for publishing rapidly and circulating reprints free of charge; the university post for staying abreast of bright young talent and new scientific ideas; and the Kaiser-Wilhelm post for privileged access to its industrialist, financier, and politician patrons. Certification in research nevertheless remained a university prerogative. German universities continued to award doctorates throughout the twentieth century, and the doctorate became a sine qua non of scientific life elsewhere – even in England, where today a certain prestige still attaches to a scholar who, like Lawrence Stone (b. 1919), Quentin Skinner (b. 1940), or Simon Schama (b. 1945), may not sport an earned doctoral degree.

Universities in the United States grafted the doctorate onto an existing structure, the undergraduate college, whose standards approximated those of a French lycée or German Gymnasium. Seeking the grail of appropriating European wisdom, American professors (complemented by a large number of European imports) taught specialized courses to students registered for an advanced degree. This new structure – departing from the freedom to choose courses which was enjoyed by European students – slowly but inexorably increased the time required for obtaining a doctorate and inflated the length of doctoral dissertations. As higher learning experienced an uneven course in Europe under the excesses of fascism and Stalinism, the modified American model provided a new standard for research training.

From the end of the nineteenth century, foreigners were astounded by the material resources of American universities. The English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), and German biologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) held significant university posts in America; by the end of the century, an American lecture tour was obligatory for leading scientific lights, like Englishman Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), German Felix Klein (1849–1925), and Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1904, who ironically referred to his tour as a voyage to El Dorado). Immigrant talent educated in the United States – physicists Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931) and Michael Idvorsky Pupin (1858–1935) – rose to the heights of their discipline. But all comers did not stay. Max Abraham (1875–1922) took the measure of a physics chair at Urbana in 1909 and then returned to Europe, where he had no comparable position. Einstein’s first scientific collaborator Jakob Laub (1882–1962) declined to fill Abraham’s Urbana chair, opting instead for one at La Plata in Argentina. Shortly after the turn of the century, Ernest Rutherford would not forsake McGill University in Montreal for Yale (although he did leave when Manchester beckoned). The United States of the 1890s held no permanent attraction for young Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), fresh out of Cambridge and married to an American Quaker. For scientists at the peak of their career in Europe, the preferred arrangement was a visiting lectureship, like those liberally endowed before the First World War. Under this arrangement, physicists Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) and Max Planck taught at Columbia University. After 1918, Einstein was lured to the California Institute of Technology for months at a time. As these examples suggest, by the first decade of the twentieth century, it was normal for German or French professors to take leave from their universities in order to occupy positions abroad, notably in the New World. There were even world-ranging, extramural professorships. In 1914, for example, geophysicist Gustav Angenheister (1878–1945) became a special professor who split his time between Göttingen and the capital of Western Samoa.

Technology has made commuting professors an established feature of academic life. In the 1920s, theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) commuted by train from Göttingen to his lectureship at Hamburg. The possibilities of commuting coincided with the end of the university science institute as a personal empire, presided over by the professor and his wife. The institute or laboratory became a university monument, rather than (as it was during a brief moment, between approximately 1870 and 1910) a living part of a professor’s aura. Only the president’s mansion, often conspicuously located on the campus of a new university, allowed state or private overseers to place an administrator on public display. But because the presidential office served as an obvious focus for student discontent, the mansion sometimes became a white elephant. Today, the president of the University of Southwestern Louisiana lives happily on campus, but the gothic presidential mansion of the University of Tokyo stands vacant – the victim of student protests a generation ago.

Along with the end of the university institute came the rise of the university department. By 1900 professors and lecturers sometimes organized sequences of courses, assigning responsiblity for all the parts of a domain, but the spectacular fragmentation of knowledge led to a hierarchical structure for managing it only in the United States. There, the arrangement extended to a military command structure, with a department chair, professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and a host of supporting staff. The departmental innovation coincided with the rise of the department store and the departmentally structured industrial firm. The inspiration is found in the administrative units of the federal government. With the model of academic departments in science, American universities distanced themselves from the European tradition where a professor taught what he liked. Science instruction became highly organized and goal-oriented. In the nineteenth century, European academics were traditionally able to take advantage of fast-breaking developments in neighbouring disciplines; in the twentieth century, innovative American academics spent much time and energy breaking out of disciplinary confinement.

Both geographical decentralization and interdisciplinary innovation have become watchwords in academic science. Electronic information-processing to some extent obviates the necessity for a scientist or scholar to reside at an ancient college of learning. Universities everywhere have adapted to new socioeconomic conditions by expanding curricula. They have always responded in this way, although never as quickly as their critics would like.

Measured and deliberate innovation is one of academia’s heavy burdens. It is also a great strength. Emerging fields of knowledge become new scientific disciplines only after they have found a secure place in universities. We look to universities for an authoritative word about the latest innovations. New scientific ideas emerge in a variety of settings, but they become the common heritage of humanity only when processed by an institution for advanced instruction like the modern university.

3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies

Above the deafening cacophony of a dozen screaming four-year-olds, a daycare teacher admonishes, ‘Now share!’ The concept of sharing a toy – of sacrificing individual possession for a communal experience, of deferring pleasure until others have taken a turn at gratification – is altogether foreign to the toddler, whose universe heretofore has been entirely self-centred and unabashedly selfish. It is seen as an important measure of maturity when the child is able to transcend the universe of ‘me and mine’, and to begin to entertain the idea of a greater social imperative.

The development of science seems to recapitulate the odyssey of every individual as he matures from infantile egotism to participation in the universe of social give-and-take. In the ancient and medieval worlds, learning about the natural world proceeded by fits and starts. People recorded intriguing theories and thoughts, constructed ingenious mechanisms and monuments, and even established schools. There existed, however, no special notion of a common mission to uncover new truths about nature, no clear idea that a division of labour could prove especially conducive to the rapid accumulation of knowledge. Earlier thinkers tended to guard and keep secret what they knew, fearing that good ideas might be stolen by a rival.

With the Scientific Revolution of the mid seventeenth century, the cultivation of natural knowledge ceased to be solitary and introspective; it became shared and communal. By working together, according to this new outlook, philosophers could accomplish more than they could by working separately; the cumulation of individual efforts by sharing would result in more gains to science than the summing of its isolated parts. Furthermore, what contemporaries labelled the ‘new science’ – signified by a corporate or composite effort – also aimed to replace words with deeds, the library with the laboratory, and systems with facts. This emphasis on activism, experiment, and experience stimulated the establishment of scientific societies, special associations where individuals could congregate and cooperate in advancing the new science.¹ In this chapter we examine the anatomy of the new societies.

These institutions for sharing became the dominating and distinguishing feature of science during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scientific societies were an essential component, not a mere by-product, of the Scientific Revolution. They became a vital instrument for formulating and transmitting scientific norms and values. They transcended the pedagogical tradition associated with universities and established a new routine, inspired by everyday circumstances. Scientific societies held meetings at regular intervals; they elected officers and set up committees. Such daily activity led to the establishment of ‘a seasonal calendar of ritual: the first formal meeting of the year, periods of election, ordinary meetings, breaks for religious and state holidays, public meetings, vacation’ and so forth.² Scientific societies may have exalted the tedious and the dull, but they enshrined a secular calendar for these mundane affairs – an essential figure of modernity. In other words, time was organized without the traditional appeal to sacred celebrations or agricultural cycles.

What led natural philosophers to embrace a new ideology associated with sharing? Certainly they did not think that invention would cease to be the fruit of one mind and would become a collective procedure. They were, after all, proud of their own discoveries. Rather, they saw advantages to associating with a group of like-minded people. The form of their association departed from medieval guilds. Associations for promoting the new science ignored matters of faith and livelihood. Nor did scientific associations seek to train apprentices. They were an avocational service club – the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Odd Fellows or Rotarians.

The learned society or academy of the seventeenth century incited and rewarded independent work. It also provided an avenue for communicating the results of scientific investigations, at first by means of the private correspondence of a secretary, and later through formal minutes and journals. Scientific societies housed books in their libraries, displayed specimens in their museums, and collected instruments in their cabinets, all these services assisting the investigations of individual members. Groups were naturally better able to purchase the costly tools required by the new science, whether telescopes, microscopes, or burning-mirrors. In this way, scientific societies made the materiel for conducting science accessible in a convenient and relatively inexpensive form. By the end of the seventeenth century, any man of scientific reputation and accomplishment belonged to a learned society or academy.

Nascent scientific organizations fulfilled less obvious functions, as well. Just to be associated with these enterprises conferred prestige on a member. This has been true virtually from the beginning, and ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) or ‘membre de l’Institut’ (member of one of the national academies of France) is today a coveted designation. In addition to this honorific function, periodic meetings of societies provided a forum for individuals to meet and discuss their work. Universities had no real place for the exchange of ideas among equals (there were neither faculty clubs nor professorial offices), but in the halls of the academy, controversies could be aired, alliances forged, and criticisms vetted.

Whence the notion for these associations? Some of them found inspiration in an invocation of Platonic free assembly and corporate activity, beyond political control. Others looked back to the Renaissance, when learned men came together under the influence of a particular patron or court. Yet, as we shall see, the Royal Society of London represented a novel departure: For the first time, individuals united together in a public body dedicated to the corporate prosecution of scientific research.

Engines of the Scientific Revolution

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, promoted ‘a cluster of disciplines concerned with natural and mechanical phenomena to the exclusion of others, linked by common methods’. It aimed to advance the realms of natural philosophy and natural history (roughly equivalent to our physical and biological sciences), and distanced itself from discussions of theology or scholastic philosophy, which it perceived as sterile. The Society’s devotion to the production of knowledge, rather than to its dissemination, sets it apart from other contemporary institutions. Its importance and prestige was confirmed by royal incorporation at the hand of Charles II.³

Sir Francis Bacon, a lawyer and chancellor to James I, became the patron saint of the Royal Society and of many other scientific societies as well. Bacon’s scientific contributions were unremarkable, but he enjoyed tremendous posthumous influence as the principal polemicist for the new science. In the New Atlantis (1627), he called for the creation of research institutions to accommodate the new learning. There he described ‘Salomon’s House’ – a collaborative effort dedicated to ‘the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Bacon maintained that only by combining the efforts of individuals could humankind hope to tackle the enormous range of questions that should be raised about the natural world. This programme formed one of the components of his projected Great Instauration, a work incomplete at the time of his death, and it complemented the inductive approach sketched in his New Organon (1620).⁴

Baconian ideology infused the creation and early years of the Royal Society. As the Society’s apologist Thomas Sprat put it, Bacon’s writings contained ‘the best Arguments, that can be produced for the Defence of experimental Philosophy, and the best Directions, that are needful to promote it’. Bacon’s views not only permeated Sprat’s official History of the Royal Society (first published in 1667), but they also found expression in the Society’s charters, diffusion in the Philosophical Transactions, and reiteration in the writings of fellows like Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and John Evelyn (1620–1706). Baconianism so well reflected the motivations of diverse associations of scientifically inclined amateurs in England that historians still try to identify the group that led directly into the creation of the Royal Society. Depending on which historian’s arguments one believes, the Royal Society may be traced to a gathering of gentlemen associated with Gresham College in London, to a less pragmatic network of London philosophers and social reformers, or to a collection of natural philosophers who eventually came to reside in Oxford.

The first of these, Gresham College, had been founded in 1597 by a legacy of the London merchant Sir Thomas Gresham to provide a series of educational lectures on a variety of topics for the local townspeople. Gresham also established resident professorships in astronomy, geometry, and medicine. His former townhouse provided a natural meeting place for scientifically inclined men, including sometime lecturers Robert Hooke (1635–1702), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and Isaac Barrow (1630–1677).

A second London group of Puritans and Parliamentarians, who flourished during the 1640s and 1650s, was attracted by the millenarian zeal exuded by Continental collaborators Jan Comenius (1592–1670), Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), and Theodore Haak (1605–1690). John Dury (1596–1680), William Petty (1623–1687), and John Evelyn numbered among the reformers who viewed the association of scientists in a scheme by Hartlib for an ‘Office of Address’ as a mechanism for practical improvement and social advancement. The ‘office’, motivated by Protestant fervour, collected information about utilitarian discoveries and inventions.

Still another group – including Seth Ward (1617–1689), Thomas Willis (1621–1675), and William Petty – went up to Oxford from London because their mentor John Wilkins (1614–1672) had assumed the wardenship of Wadham College. Wilkins, brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, made the remarkable transition from Puritan divine to Anglican bishop. His followers were part of the Royalist exodus from London (and Gresham College) that had occurred during the upheaval of the Commonwealth period, when the Puritans assumed the reins of government. Robert Boyle’s move to Oxford attracted others to the quiet college town, including architect Christopher Wren and experimenter Robert Hooke. This small group of natural philosophers organized weekly meetings to perform and conduct experiments. Some scholars contend that this was the incipient Royal Society – an association that had existed as an ‘invisible college’ under the Puritans and even previously during the reign of Charles I.

Whatever its historical antecedents, the creation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was assured when twelve men of diverse backgrounds – from Royalist to Cromwellian – gathered at Gresham College during the early days of the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660. They resolved to meet weekly to discuss and advance natural philosophy. Two years later, Charles II granted the group a royal charter. A second charter of 1663 established the operating rules and procedures of the Society. These actions bestowed upon the group of 115 scientific virtuosi a corporate status comparable to the one enjoyed by lawyers in the Inns of Court and by medical doctors in the College of Physicians. The incorporation of the Society itself meant that it could own property, employ officers, possess a seal and coat of arms, and license its own books.⁵ These were significant legal privileges at the time.

In his book The Great Instauration (1975), Charles Webster suggests that questions about the Royal Society’s origins and true character can be resolved by determining the Society’s active members. Webster identified twelve fellows – among them Boyle, Evelyn, Petty, and Wren – whose activity dominated and sustained the fledgling Society during its first two and a half years. Webster concludes that preliminary meetings were held in London during the closing years of Cromwell’s republic and that ‘diversity of outlook and experience’ brought a remarkable advantage to the group. He contends that it is ‘superfluous’ to ask whether the nucleus was Puritan or Anglican, Parliamentarian or Royalist. The early Society evolved continually in terms of its composition and interests, just as religious beliefs and political convictions fluctuated beyond its confines.

The diverse religious and political composition of the Royal Society set a premium on limiting activity to natural philosophy. The exploration of experimental and mathematical problems concentrated the energies of early fellows and minimized more fundamental differences of opinion. In this way, the Society’s work remained unaffected by the collapse of Cromwell’s republic and the restoration of the monarchy. In Webster’s words, ‘scientific work was insulated from ideological friction’. Science, according to this view, is an anodyne for social dislocation.

The Royal Society dedicated itself to ‘the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind’. It was governed by a president and a council of twenty-one fellows, from whose ranks were elected a treasurer and two secretaries. The Society employed at least two Curators of Experiments, obtained the cadavers of criminals for anatomical demonstrations, and built quarters for its assemblies in London. Fellows had to be elected by the general membership and upon election had to pay an admission fee, in addition to an annual subscription.

Although the Royal Society may be considered an organization that rewards the achievements of a scientific elite, its membership down from the early days has been relatively large, especially when compared with the size of other national scientific organizations. From its inception, the Society included a large proportion of virtuosi from the leisured classes, men whose interests have encompassed historical, literary, artistic, and archaeological studies. To the more avid scientific practitioners in the Society, the concerns of this element (who were needed for their wealth and social status) appeared aimless, unfocused, and obscure. The virtuosi also gave the Society a tendency to devolve into a social club for gentlemen. (When this current took hold in the Society during the early nineteenth century, it was ironically a member of the aristocracy, the duke of Sussex, son of George III, who reformed the Society and restored its learned purpose.)

Historian of science Marie Boas Hall has recently shifted attention from the organization’s origins and sociological composition to what actually occurred at its meetings. She has been particularly interested in the extent to which experiments were performed by the Society’s paid employees, both curators and operators, during its early years. Empirical discussions and demonstrations of experimental results seemed to offer a respite from potentially divisive political or religious issues. The airing of hypotheses, says Boas Hall, in contrast, led to ‘disputes and wranglings’ inappropriate to a ‘quiet atmosphere of learned debate’.

Boas Hall concludes that although the early Society paid lip-service to the promotion of ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, early enthusiasm soon gave way to the mere reading of papers and discussion about experiment. Although a small core of virtuosi maintained interest in the demonstration of experimental phenomena by operators (the title is significant) like Robert Hooke, most fellows sensed that the descriptions of experiments in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions possessed more enduring value than demonstrations. In the words of A. Rupert Hall, the Royal Society became ‘a place of report rather than a research institute’. Rhetoric and the prestige that flowed from association with eminent names like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle nevertheless ensured that contemporaries and historians alike have linked the Royal Society with the new experimental philosophy.⁶

The early Royal Society’s fulfilment of the Baconian imperative depended entirely on individual initiative, whether Operator Robert Hooke’s enthusiasm for performing experiments or Secretary Henry Oldenburg’s (ca.1618–1677) prosecution of the plan for creating a universal natural history. Oldenburg’s zeal for the task led to the publication of some ‘histories’ (more properly, narratives) of trades in the Philosophical Transactions. These experiential accounts derived from Oldenburg’s queries addressed on a regular basis to correspondents all over the world; by 1668, the annual volume of incoming and outgoing letters supervised by Oldenburg generally exceeded 300. James McClellan characterizes the Royal Society as encouraging ‘a vaguely defined Baconian empiricism that meshed well with the format of its meetings and the looser interests of its members’. He also sees the outward turn away from a dedicated Baconian core as the mechanism that propelled the Society to become the most important learned society of the second half of the seventeenth century.⁷

Part of the Royal Society’s Baconianism may have been rhetorical. The society encompassed a heterogeneous membership and tended to create myths about its cohesiveness when it was under attack. And attack its critics did. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for example, Jonathan Swift ridicules the futile projects pursued in the ‘Academy of Lagado’, inspired by the research undertaken by members of the Royal Society. Historian Martha Ornstein is so persuaded of the rhetorical use of Baconianism that she sees the imagery of ‘Salomon’s House’ as fulfilling for learned societies what the Communist Manifesto did for socialism.

Other scientific societies did not trace their inspiration so directly to Bacon. Galileo wielded enormous influence over scientific developments in Italy, and he was a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603. Like Rome, many Italian cities housed learned societies, more properly Renaissance academies that promoted a range of subjects: Bologna claimed an Accademia degli Affidati (1548) and Naples an Accademia Secretorum Naturae (ca. 1560) and later an Accademia degli Investiganti (ca. 1650). Unlike other Renaissance academies, however, those in Bologna and Naples concerned themselves with the cultivation of natural knowledge, rather than literature or the arts.

The foremost among the Italian academies was the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments), founded in 1657. The small society of nine members – including the important naturalists Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1674) and Francesco Redi (1626–ca.1698) – depended on the patronage of Prince Leopold de’Medici and answered to his whims. It assembled a fine collection of scientific instruments to effect its sole purpose: conducting experiments. Members tested the theoretical work of Galileo and his disciples and recorded the results anonymously in the Academy’s Saggi di naturali experienze. Despite the group’s pronounced commitment to empiricism and their rejection of all speculative theorizing, Academy members fell victim to the conservative backlash of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation. It also suffered through the centrifugal force of members’ personal quarrels, resulting in disbandment for ten years until they settled their differences.

Even seventeenth-century Germany, in its state of political fragmentation and economic torpor, could claim scientific societies. In Altdorf, a Collegium Curiosum sive Experimentale was created in 1672 with twenty members, after the model of the Accademia del Cimento. Some twenty years earlier, an Academia Naturae Curiosorum had been founded, whose principal function was to publish an annual volume of contributions by its physician members, the Miscellanea Curiosorum. But it was only with the creation of the Berlin Academy in 1700, at the urging of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that Germany could claim a society along the lines of the Royal Society or France’s Académie des Sciences. The society was to be funded by the proceeds from the monopoly on printing calendars owned by the elector (the future Prussian king, Frederick I). Part of the Berlin Academy’s programme involved the advancement of German technology and nationalism, giving particular attention to improving the German language. Leibniz’s activism also led to the creation of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724.⁸

In France, academies could be found in provincial towns like Caen, Rouen, and Montpellier. These included not only learned societies as such, but also other kinds of educational institution, including schools of manly exercise, classical languages, and oratory. The capital city (as in England) dominated scientific life at this time. One of the earliest informal circles in Paris – dating back to the 1630s – was organized by the Minim monk Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), himself devoted to the physical sciences. Mersenne, who had studied mathematics with Descartes, translated some of the writings of Galileo into French and popularized the work of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). After Mersenne’s death in 1648, a successor to his academy was organized by nobleman Habert de Montmor (ca.1600–1679), which adopted a formal constitution in 1657. Weekly meetings took place in Montmor’s house; mathematician and cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) presided over them. But the Montmor Academy became as much a social club for the highest levels of Parisian society as a forum for disseminating the new science.

It was through the Montmor Academy that the Royal Society began to influence the future shape of science in France. Members of the two organizations were linked by correspondence and personal visits; some individuals, like the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, belonged to both. The French admired the new spirit of critical enquiry exemplified by the English cultivation of empiricism and experiment. It remained unclear, however, how the English model of cooperation among men of different social backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious convictions might be applied in the French milieu. Personal rivalries – fuelled by competing philosophical doctrines like Cartesianism and experimentalism – helped to spell the collapse of Montmor Academy by 1665. The instability brought about by its indifferent financial support strengthened pleas by Melchisédech Thévenot (ca.1620–1692), Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) and Pierre Petit (ca.1594–1677) for the creation of a subsidized society for experimentation.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, responded sympathetically to the advances of the former Montmorans. He adapted the plans put forward by Thévenot and his friends, in the end calling for fifteen salaried academicians, hand-picked from among the most distinguished scientific names of Europe. The positions were divided between two categories or classes: ‘mathematicians’ (also including astronomers) and ‘natural philosophers’, made up of chemists, physicists, and anatomists. (The decision to emphasize the physical sciences resulted from Colbert’s concern to minimize conflict with other established bodies, such as the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.) In contrast to the Royal Society, members were expected to specialize in a particular area of study. Their first meeting was convened in the Royal Library in 1666. Subsequently, meetings were held twice a week: mathematicians met on Wednesdays; natural philosophers on Saturdays.

There were strings attached to this act of royal munificence, especially on the part of the mercantilist Colbert. The Académie des Sciences joined the Académie Française in the Sun King’s intellectual firmament; at the very least, it was intended to proclaim, affirm, and reflect his glory. Academicians, in addition, were expected to deliver on the experimentalists’ utilitarian promises, which linked scientific investigations with advancement in industry, trade, and military prowess.

As a result of being given a clear mandate from the government, the early Académie des Sciences appeared to embrace the Baconian programme of cooperative research in at least two concrete ways that the Royal Society did not. The establishment of the Observatoire de Paris in 1699 allowed Academicians to carry out a continuous programme of observing the heavens and mounting scientific expeditions, with these undertakings ultimately leading to the solution of navigational and astronomical problems. The Académie also required its members to cooperate on a regular basis in order to adjudicate the merit of technical processes and to bestow patents on worthy inventions. The practice of the early Académie des Sciences suggests that cooperative efforts were more effectively applied to evaluating new ideas than to creating them.

The workings of the early Académie des Sciences remain somewhat obscure, at least until a total overhaul occurred in 1699. Before this date, the Académie had possessed neither rules nor constitution. Colbert himself had selected the first academicians, foreign as well as French, the most distinguished being the Dutch natural philosopher Huygens. Later appointees to the working membership of fifteen pensionaries – rigidly divided according to scientific speciality (geometry, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, or chemistry) – included the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and the polymath Leibniz. The Académie possessed, in addition, ten honorary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, Cartesians were excluded in this, the home of Descartes; activists like Auzout and Thévenot were marginalized. At this early stage in its history, the Académie des Sciences functioned under Baconian inspiration, with a small membership undertaking joint experimental investigations on a range of topics. It was an elitist association, limited in size with an exclusive admissions policy.⁹

To some extent the early Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences may be seen as typifying the English and French scientific traditions. The Royal Society grew out of individual initiative and received royal recognition only after the fact. From its inception, it drew heavily upon the landed gentry for its membership and treasury; as a result, the breadth of its interests wandered away from the narrowly scientific. The Académie des Sciences, by contrast, functioned more as a branch of the French civil service, with a high degree of regimentation and control exercised from above. It remains difficult to assess the relative merits of the two scientific systems: the French, with its strong stamp of centralization and control, versus the English tradition, which cultivated individual self-reliance, perhaps as a direct result of the lack of state support. Whatever the advantages of either system, we see here the first crystallization of national differences in scientific traditions. The rise of nation states in the nineteenth century enhanced these distinctions.

Science flourished in Britain during the last half of the seventeenth century, despite the collapse of earlier humanitarian projects and the cynicism displayed by the king. Any decline in membership in the Royal Society was more than counterbalanced by the rise of new provincial centres of scientific activity, for example, in the creation of philosophical societies at Dublin and Oxford, both founded in 1683. As Michael Hunter has explained, seventeenth century English society showed a penchant for establishing public bodies, as opposed to impermanent, highly mutable structures dependent on personal whim.

France, on the other hand, failed to emerge as a centre of scientific excellence, despite the elaborate designs of enlightened despotism which had brought the full support of the state to a host of scientific projects. By the late seventeenth century, these programmes fell afoul of political and economic contingencies. The increasingly extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, ushering in an era of prolonged warfare with England, meant a decline in financial support for science. A period of domestic intolerance, inaugurated with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, further contracted opportunities for the free exchange of scientific ideas, and Protestant intellectuals like Henri Justel (1620–1693) were marginalized.

The rise of the scientific correspondent

The creation and persistence of the new institutions attests the strength of the scientific movement. An additional ‘barometer of intellectual health’, in the words of Harcourt Brown, was the ‘exchange of news, books, and journals’ among these organizations, particularly through official or unofficial representatives. Operating from the Place Royale in Paris, for example, Mersenne circulated information to an informal network of French natural philosophers, including Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), Gilles de Roberval (1602–1675) and Blaise Pascal. Mersenne constructed an unprecedented system of scientific communication, with nearly eighty participants. An even more elaborate correspondence network was established by the Royal Society’s Henry Oldenburg, who as secretary from 1662 until his death in 1677, exchanged information with Mersenne and Henri Justel, secretary to Louis XIV. Modern science began as an international undertaking.

Justel disseminated English scientific news and books across continental Europe. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1693, he was Henry Oldenburg’s most important link with Europe; he lent incalculable assistance to advancing the Royal Society’s reputation. Justel channelled information through a circle of intimate acquaintances who attended his ‘conferences’ in Paris, as well as through a more widely ranging network of contacts with the leading intellectuals of Europe. French members of his circle included Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), founder of the Caen Académie des Sciences and the Abbé Charles, one of the editors of the Journal des sçavans. Despite Justel’s illustrious collaborators, his correspondence has been seen as valuable not for its coherent exposition of a particular point of view, but for ‘the mass of dissociated facts and opinions … conveyed’.¹⁰ Even a cursory examination of the letters exchanged between Oldenburg and Justel reveals how much useful scientific information could be gleaned from what appears to be, on the surface, just delightfully candid gossip.

Intelligencers like Justel and Oldenburg depended upon travellers and diplomats to transmit their parcels and letters. A network of courtiers, statesmen, and civil servants scattered across the Continent, the Near East, and the New World provided Oldenburg with the machinery for collecting information and gaining new foreign agents. Oldenburg’s contacts, who introduced him to local virtuosi, sent summaries of new books, reports of experiments, and simple accounts of everyday scientific activity. Formal relations between the Royal Society and foreign academies were merely polite and sterile; virtually all news of Continental science went to Oldenburg from Justel or from Englishmen abroad.

The importance of these connections suggests that the rise of scientific societies has depended on the emergence of the apparatus of the modern state. Departing from traditional Marxist arguments by which science is driven by economic need, the demands of capitalism failed to dictate a set of problems to seventeenth-century researchers. Rather, the expansion of trade and commerce associated with the rise of capitalism provided a means of collecting and amassing valuable information. Groups in one geographical location could be brought into communication with like-minded individuals elsewhere. Essentially, seventeenth-century mercantile developments nurtured and sustained the evolution of learned societies.

Eighteenth-century expansion

A century after the creation of the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences there were around two hundred societies devoted to science or technology. In France alone, twenty-five provincial academies appeared by the eve of the French Revolution. Generally speaking, these societies stimulated research and provided for the diffusion of that research through their publications. The appellation of ‘literary society’ – characteristic of eighteenth-century societies – refers less to their cultivation of belles lettres than to their concern with scientific literature.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, learned societies emerged, as James McClellan puts it, as ‘the characteristic form for the organization of culture’ throughout the Western world and its spheres of influence. A host of subsets of these societies might be discussed, but for our purpose those exclusively or even partially devoted to science (along with literary studies or technology) are the most interesting. Their exponentially increasing number outdistanced other institutional forms of scientific activity, whether botanical gardens, observatories, or universities. No leading scientist was without an affiliation to one of them. Not only did they sponsor publications, but they endowed prizes and funded expeditions. McClellan understands the flourishing of scientific academies during the last half of the eighteenth century as ‘an unprecedented development in the organizational and institutional history of science’. As he demonstrates, by the end of the eighteenth century, scientific societies extended ‘from Philadelphia and Kentucky in the west to Saint Petersburg (or arguably Batavia, the East Indies) in the east, and from Trondheim (Norway) in the north to Sicily and Haiti in the south’.

The establishment of learned societies during the eighteenth century became an international movement, reaching its peak in the 1780s. These institutions were concentrated in European urban centres, particularly in France. Few nations failed to support scientific societies; only the European capital cities of Spain and Austria were without them. They were – alongside churches, courts of law, and universities – manifestations of high culture, with all its implications of exclusiveness. Only during the next century would this fundamental characteristic of scientific societies be altered; no longer would they be the exclusive prerogative of a learned and powerful elite.

Eighteenth-century developments may be categorized according to the two dominant models for scientific organization established during the seventeenth century. One was that of the Paris Académie des Sciences, the generic ‘academy’, frequently found on the Continent. The other, the ‘society’ model exemplified by the Royal Society, emerged in the less stratified societies of Britain, the United States, and Holland. Both types are united by their possession of chartered corporate status and written rules. They convened regular meetings, appointed officers, and elected a restricted number of fellows. In addition to official quarters, they often claimed libraries, collections, botanical gardens, and observatories.

Important distinctions, however, may also be drawn between the academy and society models. Academies, more so than societies, tended to be state-supported institutions; the state accordingly extracted its due by controlling their duties and responsibilities. Societies enjoyed much more autonomy and independence, but because they lacked a clearly defined mission, they tended to be less productive. The internal structure of the two forms of scientific institution differed significantly, which may be illuminated by comparing the Académie des Sciences with the Royal Society.

The Académie des Sciences possessed a restricted, yet heterogeneous membership, stratified in a strict hierarchy. Its officers were drawn from its two constituent classes, the regular and the honorary members. At the top of the scientific core of regular members (pensionnaires, who were paid pensions for their services) were eighteen individuals, three of whom represented each of the Académie’s six sections: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, chemistry, and botany, in addition to the permanent secretary and treasurer. Below them in the hierarchy were twelve associate and twelve adjunct members. Nonresident members who did not have to attend meetings but who were excluded from decision-making came next: twelve members from the provinces, eight distinguished foreign scientists, and seventy corresponding members. On average, the Académie could claim just over one hundred and fifty members at any point during the eighteenth century, with fewer than fifty among the resident scientific core. In total, only 716 men belonged to the Académie over the course of the century.

The Royal Society – ‘larger, less professional and exclusive, and more homogeneous’, in the words of James McClellan – was no match for the success of the Académie des Sciences, where scientific accomplishment, finally, was the currency of admission. The Royal Society averaged 325 fellows, seven times the size of the core group in Paris, with nonscientists outnumbering scientists two to one. Election was decided by the membership itself. Without any internal differentiation of its membership into categories or classes, the society became too unwieldy to conduct administrative matters, let alone prosecute any kind of joint scientific endeavours, at its weekly meetings. During the eighteenth century, a twenty-one member elected council, led by an increasingly powerful president, assumed all administrative responsibilities and became the ‘guiding force’ of the Society.

Both the Paris Académie and the Royal Society spawned imitators elsewhere. Academies in Montpellier, Turin, and Mannheim, for example, imitated Paris’s example. Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society copied the Royal Society. A new hybrid form introduced during and characteristic of the eighteenth century was the ‘universal’ society devoted to both science and the arts. The Royal Society of Edinburgh contained literary and scientific sections; the Royal Irish Academy was divided into science, belles lettres, and antiquities. The typical French provincial society dedicated itself to science, belles lettres, and the mechanical arts. German academies often focused on wissenshaftlichen disciplines. Those in Göttingen and Prague had sections for physical, mathematical, and historical sciences. As McClellan summarizes this diversity, when resources were scarce, the ‘multi-area’ institution was adopted; the ‘single field type’ emerged where resources were plentiful.

The most important scientific societies of the eighteenth century were official institutions, legally recognized by their respective governments. This legal status conferred important privileges on the societies, including technological consulting, control of the scientific press, and self-government. McClellan argues that according to this arrangement, institutions and governments ‘struck a deal’, whereby institutions received ‘recognition, funding, and privileges in exchange for technical service and advice’. In essence, societies and academies sold their expertise and knowledge for the power to control the practice of science within their own cultural milieu. The emerging nation states of Europe supported scientific societies as a gesture of alliance with the forces of rational enlightenment, progress, and modernization.

Scientific associations, coming in many shapes and sizes, also may be arranged according to a pyramid of importance. An elite group of national academies in capital cities belong to the top of the hierarchy: the Royal Society, the Paris Académie, the Berlin Academy, the St Petersburg Academy, and the Royal Swedish Academy. Almost all were devoted to scientific pursuits exclusively; they received generous support and powerful privileges, often dating back a century or more. At the next level fall a host of institutions founded in large urban centres and provincial capitals; these include societies and academies in Edinburgh, Montpellier, Göttingen, Bologna, and Philadelphia. They received only modest financial revenues, they tended to be founded later in the eighteenth century, and they cultivated nonscientific subjects alongside science. The scientific accomplishments of this more heterogeneous group were less uniform and less sustained. The base of the pyramid rested on institutions that never built a reputation; these include societies at Marseilles, Barcelona, and Rotterdam, for example. Many were founded in smaller towns and cities late in the century and did not obtain official recognition for years. They cultivated a range of disciplines and possessed undistinguished memberships.

What makes the eighteenth century unique for the institutionalization of science is that individual organizations – big or little, national or local – interacted to forge a larger institutional network. As the Memoirs of the Medical Society of London, founded in 1773, stated: ‘The principal part of our knowledge must be ever derived from comparing our own observations with those of others. In this view the utility of societies, which afford an opportunity for the mutual communication of our thoughts, must be sufficiently apparent.’ Sending memoirs and soliciting exchanges became a routine activity. This meant that scientific research and information could henceforth be circulated through regular channels. At issue here is something other than publication, which had already been inaugurated through the system of official journals; rather, academic publications found an assured venue of distribution. In a word, the academies began to ‘market’ science, having done their utmost to create an audience.

Nineteenth-century consolidation

Once firmly established in the collective consciousness, scientific societies and academies became arbiters of science. With the French revolutionary zeal to abolish privilege in all of its manifestations, it is hardly surprising that the Académie des Sciences became a prime target. It was an institution, even an instrument, of the king, and it was a bastion of elitism. Myths were perpetuated about how self-taught artisans presented their inventions to a jaded academy, only to be rebuffed and humiliated. Not only did the Académie represent an intellectual aristocracy, but it contained a special class of honorary members selected from the social aristocracy. It met for the last time on 21 December 1792; it re-emerged in 1795 as the First Class (or division) of the Institut de France. (With the restoration of the monarchy, the former title of Académie was likewise restored.)

Even before this reincarnation, the Académie des Sciences had begun to turn its back on its Baconian heritage, particularly the collectivist imperative. Rather than acting to generate scientific knowledge, the Académie emerged as an adjudicator, passing judgement on the merits of its members’ contributions, in pure and in applied fields. Its imprimatur became a coveted sign of national, or even international, prestige. Election to an academy seat became the crowning achievement of a life’s work; appointment to a professorial chair seemed trivial by comparison. Unlike the case during the eighteenth century, all academicians (at least in theory) were equal, since junior ranks had been abolished. By making election a process of ‘filling dead men’s shoes’ – whereby leading contenders most closely approximated the deceased (or soon to depart) academician – the Académie defined the shape of science in France. As Maurice Crosland explains, it was almost as if the subjects included in the First Class of the Institute chose the academicians.

The Académie des Sciences inaugurated new functions during the nineteenth century, such as semiannual public meetings. The Comptes rendus, created in 1835, brought the proceedings of the Academy and the eloquent éloges of its deceased members to the attention of an international community. Crosland argues that the centrality and comprehensiveness of the Comptes rendus tended to relegate all extramural efforts to oblivion. Responsibility for publications belonged to the permanent secretary, elected for life and given a comfortable annual salary of 6000 francs (about 300 pounds sterling).

By the mid nineteenth century, the Royal Society had also forsaken parts of its earlier scientific mission. Its statutes finally recognized that its role in experiment was more passive than active, more imagined than real. Regulations stated simply that the Society’s purpose was ‘to read and hear letters, reports, and other papers, concerning Philosophical matters’. In Boas Hall’s words, the atmosphere of meetings changed from ‘an atmosphere of lively discussion and debate and the frequent display of experiment’ to one that was ‘determinedly formal and lifeless’. This change did not signify that experiment was held in low regard, or that fellows had ceased to be good experimentalists, nor that nineteenth-century experiments could not be demonstrated. Rather, it indicated that the Society’s conventions had changed, placing new emphasis on results rather than processes. Papers might derive from experiment, but they were no longer accompanied by experiential demonstration.

No one disputed that experiment formed the centrepiece of the Society’s activities, only that this approach offered an imperfect and impartial view of the natural world. This was precisely the criticism of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, who believed that experimentalism offered an insufficient replacement for general principles, frameworks, and even theories. The complaint resurfaced among the spiritualists, vitalists, and theologians of later centuries, who found their concerns excluded by a materialist Royal Society. In 1878, the British geologist John Jeremiah Bigsby (1792–1881), for example, lamented the fact that in the Royal Society ‘Belief in no God and no Bible is openly paraded’. His protégé, Canadian paleobotanist John William Dawson (1820–1899), concurred that the religious scepticism of its leaders was ‘eating the heart’ out of science.

The emergence of specialized societies

Since its inception in the seventeenth century, the scientific society has sought to represent a range of philosophical interests. Sometimes art and antiquities were included to accommodate the interests of aristocratic virtuosi; certainly members’ investigations into any part of the natural sciences (and their applications) were welcomed. With the growth in size of the scientific community over the course of the eighteenth century and with the expansion of its interests, organizations devoted to the sciences in general no longer commanded attention. Scientists began to occupy themselves with a more restricted range of human experience, seeking, as well, to associate themselves with others who held similar concerns. As a result, the specialist society – one based on what we would recognize as the contents of a particular scientific discipline – began to emerge. Organizations like the Geological Society of London, founded in 1807, became known for the camaraderie and conviviality exhibited by its members, in contrast to the stiff formality displayed in the proceedings of the Royal Society.

James McClellan sees the creation of specialist societies around the turn of the nineteenth century as an accentuation of a tradition in existence decades earlier. He admits, however, that with the foundation of the Linnean Society of London in 1788, the single-discipline society became ‘less the institutional oddity, and more the norm’. In England, the Geological Society of London (1807), Zoological Society of London (1826), Royal Astronomical Society (1831), and Chemical Society of London (1841) followed in relatively quick succession. Henceforth the tendency in scientific organization was a coalescence around disciplinary interests.

As it turned out, the partial solution to specialist interests provided in the sections of the Académie des Sciences simply meant that societies restricted to certain scientific disciplines were created, on average, about a generation later in France than in England.¹¹ French academicians did not perceive the establishment of these societies as a threat to their hegemony, since, in their view, the Académie contained the most distinguished practitioners in any particular speciality. Academicians often accepted (with some degree of condescension) senior positions in these societies, a procedure intended to elevate the new organization’s status. Unlike the Académie, specialist societies in France acted to diffuse the study of one particular science to a wider audience.

Jealousy towards rival scientific organizations was not an unreasonable reaction on the part of established societies, particularly when new fields of knowledge were represented. The danger was that specialized societies might become associated with the vanguard, and general societies with the rearguard, of the scientific enterprise. Indeed, in the case of Paul Broca (1824–1880) and the Anthropological Society in Paris, the new society offered the means of establishing the legitimacy of the nascent social science of anthropology. The formal organization attracted attention to and supplied a power base for the discipline’s founders and promoters.

The complexity of the relationship between established national societies and new specialist ones is revealed in the interactions between the Royal Society and the Geological Society. As Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the powerful president of the Royal Society, expressed his fear about the incipient importance of the geological and other London societies: ‘these new fangled Associations will finally dismantle the Royal Society and not leave the old lady a rag to cover her’. Geologists, for their part, felt that their interests commanded little respect in the eyes of the older society. One aspirant to membership was cautioned that ‘unless a geological paper be of high merit it does not meet in the Royal Society such acceptance as one in terrestrial magnetism, electricity, [or] chemistry’.

It is hardly surprising that the Royal Society should have felt some jealousy towards its younger, more lively sibling. Since its foundation, the Geological Society grew more fashionable and scientifically significant. It was composed, wrote the distinguished Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), of ‘robust, joyous, and independent spirits, who toiled well in the field, and who did battle and cuffed opinions with much spirit and great good will’. Charles Babbage (1792–1871) lauded the Geological Society in his generally gloomy treatise on the decline of science in England, and no important geologist refused to join the organization. Furthermore, governments and universities referred geological matters not to the Royal Society but to influential members of the Geological Society. The rolls of the Society listed distinguished fellows by the 1830s – peers, members of parliament, landowners, and bankers; both Charles Darwin and the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892) joined during that decade. Leading scientists filled positions on its Council: Roderick Murchison (1792–1871), Charles Lyell (1797–1875), and William Whewell (1794–1866) served as president; secretaries included Henry De la Beche (1796–1855) and Darwin.

At the same time that they inspired others to copy them and as they accommodated their hegemony to specialist interests, scientific bodies also fuelled petty feuds and disputes, particularly from those who had been excluded. Sometimes the jealousy remained merely isolated, negative, and remote; on other occasions, it assumed a more positive role, by uniting the dissatisfied and bringing them together to form rival institutions. Even the Canadian Sir William Dawson, whose interests had been badly served by establishment science, so esteemed the Royal Society that he modelled Canada’s national scientific society after it. A range of alternative scientific organizations – some broadly conceived, some specialist in focus – were spawned from the late eighteenth century onwards. They generally sought to democratize the scientific enterprise and to extend the benefits of membership to a larger circle.

4 Watching: Observatories in the Middle East, China, Europe and America

On a clear summer night walk as far as you can beyond the electric colours of urban life. Leave the shimmering rivers of hot air, as they snake above pavement and monument, causing the stars to twinkle. Go to where you can smell no exhaust, hear no human noise. Go at dusk and look up as the stars come out.

What may be seen? First there is the spectrum of the sky, yellow to red to faint-green and on to indigo. There may be birds, insects, and bats. There are condensation trails from high-flying jet aircraft, rapid transits of orbiting satellites, and shooting stars. Depending on one’s eyesight and location on the globe, the night sky reveals between one thousand and two thousand points of light. Located in a narrow band among these fixed stars there are seven objects that trace cyclical patterns. Until quite recently, the accidental trajectories of these seven objects – the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – found a central place in many civilizations. The stars have never reliably predicted the outcome of commercial, military, or personal initiatives, but their regular movements have nevertheless had an impact on our lives.

One among the seven moving stars is of critical importance. Biological cycles of growth and renewal reflect the apparent periodical motion of the sun – the solar year. We reckon age by solar cycles, not lunar ones, even in societies where the calendar is closely tied to the moon. This is so because the moon’s periodicity will not in itself predict spring inundations or winter rains, the return of migratory birds or fishes, or the best time to plant or harvest. Periodical changes in the moon’s aspect, linked with the slower, uneven velocity of the sun’s changing position in the sky, can be made to establish a yearly calendar of twelve months (each beginning with new moons) and a rather large fraction of leftover days. Astronomical science has traditionally focused on how to take care of the fraction. Once a calendar (months with a fixed number of days each) was in place, astronomical observations could be kept reliably. Records made possible the identification of cycles for the five remaining planets, the precession of the equinoxes, and predictions of such things as solar eclipses (or the possibility of them).

The existence of a calendar must not imply that we have direct access to events noted by it. Establishing a reliable chronology of antiquity – a goal sought by Europeans since medieval times – was possibly the greatest achievement of the broader historical discipline in the nineteenth century, and this occurred following a meticulous analysis of planetary records on Babylonian clay tablets. All calendars require intercalation of some sort (ours today supplies the odd day or second to round out the apparent solar year). The corrections may follow a formula or, more empirically, a celestial observation. The advantages of a determination of days and years by first principles is apparent to any head of state. Indeed, the state has generally supported astronomical observation – perhaps even (as some interpreters of Stonehenge contend) from paleolithic times.

Until Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope skyward, the seven stars that change their relative positions in a cyclical pattern were the givens of scientific endeavour. Predicting the movement of these jewels and orbs provided an arena for mathematical virtuosity, a justification for maintaining libraries, a reason for establishing schools of advanced learning, and an excuse for international collaboration. Because the patrons of this apparatus demanded practical results in the way of reliable calendars, astronomers devoted effort toward studying persistent empirical trends, such as the precession of the vernal equinox, the change in the stars behind the sun on the first day of spring.

Patrons demanded a great deal of their star gazers. Astronomers were called upon to pronounce on occasional spectacular events, such as eclipses. Through the twentieth century, astronomers have addressed meteorology – the corruptible, sublunar domain of Aristotelian physics named after the blazing objects in the sky, meteors, that were apparently as ephemeral as the rain. Astronomers were charged with telegraphical signals and radio broadcasts. They measured fundamental physical quantities in gravimetry (the gravitational constant identified by Isaac Newton) and optics (the speed of light, first calculated by Ole Christensen Römer [1644–1710]). Occasionally they chronicled the flight of migratory birds and assembled demographical statistics. They addressed whatever depended on a sharp eye and a head for figures. Until the twentieth century, astronomers were the practical masters of the realm of numbers.

The Islamic observatory

Astronomers differed from casual stargazers in that they required a special place for making observations. Observing in a grand observatory required a team of people. They had to be ready for the right moment and hope that a cloud did not intervene. In practice, this implied a support staff of servants and some form of lodging for the observers. Understanding the data required a library and calculating devices – whether pen and paper, abacus, clay tablet, or sand table. Apprentice observers had to be trained. Instruments had to be maintained. Regular reports about celestial omens and calendars had to be produced. Four thousand years of astronomical practice are continued at today’s enormous, mountain-top research installations.

We have seen that the endowed, residential college, or madrasa, was an innovation of medieval Islam. It is also to Islamic civilization that we owe the invention of the astronomical observatory. This occurred under al-Mamûn, early in the ninth century. A great patron of learning, al-Mamûn financed major astronomical complexes at Damascus and Baghdad. These possessed modifications of the instruments mentioned by Ptolemy, including an armillary sphere of concentric circles for tracking the stars, a marble mural quadrant (a graded quarter-circle mounted on a wall) for observing the height of stars above the horizon, and a five-metre gnomon or stile. The observatories assembled a group of perhaps as many as a dozen talented astronomers, one of whom was Ptolemy’s commentator al-Farghânî (Alfraganus, fl. 850), who constructed tables, or zijes, based on observations. Astrological interest, especially as it related to solar eclipses (for which Ptolemaïc data had to be corrected), was undoubtedly the motor of al-Mamûn’s astronomical patronage.

Knowledge may naturally tend to disaggregate, pooling here and there, channelling along one or another stream, evaporating into the air. The disaggregation is present in Islamic astronomy. During the Abbasid golden age, al-Mamûn’s observatories were distinct from the learned academy at Baghdad, the Dar al-Hikmah or House of Wisdom, which had been founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid. The academy functioned as a collector and filter of learning from all sources, east and west. Greek and Indian texts, and possibly also Hebrew ones, were recovered and translated into Arabic. Among the most notable academicians was Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (fl. 830), author of the first Arabic text on algebra (based on both Greek and Indian sources) as well as a work on Indian numerals. Al-Khwarizmi also composed a treatise on Hindu astronomy, recalculated much of Ptolemy’s data for the seven planets, and provided tables for calculating eclipses as well as trigonometrical functions. He certainly knew about the work conducted at al-Mamûn’s observatories, especially on establishing the obliquity of the ecliptic, but he chose not to incorporate the new results.

Al-Mamûn’s observatories did not survive his reign (he died in 833), but they established a precedent for observing nature. Over the next centuries, Islamic observatories extended their programmes to all the planets. The institutions became characterized by grand instruments (sometimes surpassing in size those at European locations up to the eighteenth century) and the staff (more numerous than European staff) to manoeuvre them. Observatories acquired legal status and operated under the eye of a director. The astronomical work and instrumental innovations of the polymath Ibn Sînâ (Avicenna, 980–1037), based on observations taken early in the eleventh century at an observatory financed by the amir of Isfahan at Hamadân, followed the earlier pattern. But the institutional evolution occurred unevenly. Distinguished observers, such as al-Battânî (Albategnius, fl. 880) and Ibn Yûnus (late tenth century), seem not to have availed themselves of a permanent observing facility, even though they were much concerned with astronomical innovation. Ibn Yûnus, for example, invented something akin to the method of transversals.

European commentators have traditionally celebrated Islamic savants as transmitters of Hellenistic learning; less time has been spent detailing Islamic scientific innovation. But there is no doubt that in astronomy, Islamic observations expanded and became more sophisticated. The crucial tasks of an Islamic observatory related only to the sun and the moon. One needed to establish dates of religious observances (for the Muslim lunar calendar) and times of daily prayers, keyed to sunrise and sunset. With the accessibility of Hellenistic texts, precise measurements of the sun led to interest in anomalous motions, such as precession of the equinoxes, and eventually to concern with the five remaining planets. Indeed, programmes to observe the five smaller bodies provided a justification for the permanent endowment of an observatory. It takes about thirty years of watching the sky to document all planetary regularities, and this is the working lifetime of an astronomer. Among observatories with a long-term programme was the one founded by the late eleventh-century Seljuq sultan Jalal al-Dîn Malikshâh at Isfahan; its staff of as many as eight men included al-Khayyami, the mathematician and astronomer known for his poetry as Omar Khayyam (ca.1048–ca.1131). The astronomers at the Malikshâh Observatory were the first to emphasize to their patron that it would take thirty years to record changes in the sky; from their time forward the generational argument became an astronomical watchword.

The slow pace of institutional development reflected uncertainties about using large measuring devices. One principle has dominated astronomy since antiquity: the larger the measuring device, the more accurate the observations. During the Islamic period large azimuthal rings installed on the ground to measure points on the compass were cast in copper (notably one five metres in diameter at the early twelfth-century al-Afdal al-Bataihî Observatory in Cairo), and large mural quadrants were cut into the ground and faced in marble. The moving parts of these instruments were usually made from wood – indeed, wood was preferred to brass for mural quadrants and even sextants up to the eighteenth century. But the wood warped with time and weather, especially as the large instruments were normally open to the elements. Heavy moving parts – the arm on one of Ptolemy’s rulers, for example – had to be suspended in such a way as to minimize creep. One reason for the slow growth of early observatories is that many astronomers, among them Ibn Yûnus, actually favoured small devices – even portable ones – that could be manipulated by one observer.

The peak of Islamic observatory-building took place during the thirteenth century, and its exemplar was the one founded at the city of Marâgha, south of Tabriz in present-day Iran, by Mangû, brother of the Muslim conqueror Hulâgû. Mangû, by all accounts a convinced patron of learning, seems to have first thought about inviting the most distinguished astronomer among his new Islamic subjects, Nasîr al-Dîn al-Tusî (1201–1274), to found an observatory at Beijing or possibly the Mongol capital of Qaraqurum. Indeed, during the Mongol period there was renewed intellectual interchange between East Asia and Central Asia. Several accounts refer to an Islamic astronomer, with his instruments, visiting China at just this time, and Chinese astronomers certainly travelled west. Nasîr al-Tusî may have gone east, but he certainly supervised the construction of the Marâgha Observatory, beginning in 1259. The inspiration for the Marâgha observatory, it is reasonable to assume, was Mangû’s familiarity with the Chinese tradition of constructing a new calendar for a new sovereign. To keep his hand in traditional, Chinese star-reckoning, Mangû brought Fao Mun-Ji to Marâgha at the onset of the enterprise.

To insure the life of the observatory beyond his own reign, Mangû provided it with a waqf endowment – the first known application of applying to astronomy the mechanism for endowing madrasa and hospital. The resulting revenues financed the observatory during the reigns of subsequent rulers until the dissolution of the Mongol state about 1316. Nasir al-Tusî’s sons succeeded him in directing the observatory, and it may be that he and they were the waqf administrators. The charitable endowment allowed the observatory to become an institution for instruction in the secular, or ancient sciences – the natural sciences excluded from the madrasas. In this, too, the observatory followed the pattern of Islamic teaching hospitals.

The Marâgha Observatory had a main building surmounted by a dome, through a hole in which the sun could be observed. It included an enormous library (by one account more than 400,000 volumes) and housed terrestrial and celestial globes. Many of the observatory’s rooms were excavated caves. (Astronomical observations are often made when a star passes overhead at the zenith, and for these altitude measurements, an excavated trench with a mural quadrant is fine.) Among its instruments were a fixed armillary sphere with five rings, a mural quadrant, a solar armilla, an equinoctial ring, and a parallactic ruler. The instruments went to produce a set of zijes, the so-called Ilkhâni Tables which provided data for all seven moving stars.

Marâgha formed a precedent for Mongol astronomical patronage. In the fifteenth century, Ulugh Beg (grandson of Timûr, feared in Europe as Tamerlane) erected the most magnificent of Islamic observatories at Samarqand. He became an expert astronomer, apparently constructing his observatory around an existing madrasa. He initiated astronomical instruction at the madrasa and drew talented astronomers, notably Ghiyâth al-Dîn al-Kashî (d. 1429), to the observatory, which he endowed with a waqf. The observatory apparently survived Ulugh Beg’s reign (he was murdered by his son), settling into a slow decline over the succeeding century. The Islamic tradition of grand astronomical institutions continued into the sixteenth century, with the construction of an observatory at Istanbul under the direction of Takiyüddin al-Rasid (1526–1585). It functioned for several years before being dismantled in 1580, at the request of the sultan who founded it. The last of the great Islamic observatories came in South Asia early in the eighteenth century, courtesy of Maharaja Swai Jai Singh II.

The Islamic tradition may be placed in perspective by introducing the late sixteenth-century astronomical fiefdom of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), granted by King Frederick II of Denmark and financed by Tycho’s inherited fortune supplemented by Frederick’s largesse. Tycho had workshops for his instrument-makers, a mill for producing paper, and a printing press. The main house of Tycho’s Uraniborg functioned as a chateau, complete with running water, kitchen, chemical laboratories, workrooms, library (housing a five-foot-in-diameter celestial globe) and bedrooms. Tycho had large instruments mounted on the top of the house. A separate observatory building had more instruments set in subterranean rooms equipped with plinths. With its generous royal endowment and its massive, innovative instruments, Uraniborg was nothing other than the European counterpart of the Istanbul Observatory. Tycho’s observatory was an inspiration for Francis Bacon’s invocation of the notion of a House of Salomon, which in turn became a model for the Royal Society of London. In a sense, we may trace modern scientific institutions to medieval Islam.

It is doubtful that Tycho had first-hand information about the observatories of his Islamic predecessors. His instruments followed Ptolemy’s instructions, which he adapted and added to on the basis of European tradition – just as medieval Islamic astronomers began with Ptolemy and constructed innovative measuring arms, armillary spheres, and scales. Medieval Islamic observatories, located as they were between Western Europe and Eastern Asia, nevertheless suggest questions about interchanges between West and East.

When we look west, we find little direct Islamic inspiration for the organization of astronomical activity. The area of closest contact between Islam and Christianity, Andalusia, was insulated against the urge to construct grand state observatories. The insularity derived from the effective independence of Western Islam and especially the diverse Spanish emirates and kingdoms. This is not to say that intellectuals in Spain were less interested in the stars than were people in Central Asia. Certainly the eleventh-century group of astronomers around al-Zarqâli (d. 1100) who compiled zijes that became known in Europe as the Toledan Tables undertook significant observations, but the work was apparently accomplished without a permanent observing facility.

Chinese astronomy

What about the East? Can it be that the inspiration for Islamic observatories came from China? There is no doubt that various Chinese governments maintained astronomical offices, and with them the means of making sophisticated astronomical observations, for at least seven centuries before a similar spirit infected Islamic authorities.

Knowledge of the sky was an imperial prerogative from the time of the Han. The heavens were held to have conferred a mandate on the imperial house, and reading the stars was a way of learning whether terrestrial policies found divine favour. Portent astrology (where one sought divine instruction from the sky by reading celestial signs) rather than individual fate astrology (the notion of a preordained future that suffused western Eurasia) dominated the court institutions of Chinese astronomy. New rulers and new regimes, in fact, promulgated new calendars as a practical sign of their celestial mandate. In the Han, astronomy went under the Office of the Grand Historian, for it combined the functions of archivist and omen reader. About 90 BC, the head of this office, Ssu-ma Chhien, compiled the dynastic history known as the Shih Chi, which had chapters devoted to calendar construction and astrology. This tradition continued (with the same kind of ups and downs that characterize institutions of higher learning in the Mediterranean basin) for two millennia.

The Chinese dynasty at the time of the rise of Islam, the Thang, received ambassadors and merchants from Byzantium, Persia, and elsewhere. Among the foreigners living in China under the Thang were Indian astronomers. In the seventh century there are indications of Brahmin astronomy being translated into Chinese. Beginning around 650, three families of Indian astronomers held positions in the imperial astronomical bureau. Of these, astronomers of the Gautama family found their calendrical work officially adopted. Chhüthan Shi-Ta or Gautama Siddhartha (fl. 718), the greatest of the clan, became director of Thang astronomy and wrote a major mathematical work in 729 which featured the zero symbol, division of the circle into 360 degrees (the Chinese circle traditionally contained 364.25 degrees), and sexagesimal minutes and seconds. No doubt the resident Indian astronomer families made use of trigonometry, then unknown in China. Despite internecine disputes about astronomical secrets (the Chinese Buddhist monk and brilliant mathematician I-hsing became involved in some of these disputes), the Indian families produced an officially accepted calendar, calculated solar eclipses, and wrote an astrological treatise.

The observatory where the Indian astronomers lived and worked was large, even by modern standards. Two grand astrologers supervised the Astronomical Bureau in Thang China, an institution that combined features of observatory and college. They operated one of the largest astronomical schools of any time. In the bureau’s astrological department, 2 professors supervised 5 observers and 150 students; one professor of calendar-making oversaw 2 technicians and 41 students; 6 professors of time-keeping had 37 technicians, 440 clerks to handle various bells and drums that signalled the hours, and 360 students. Separate from the Astronomical Bureau was the Divination Bureau. Divination concerned foreseeing the future on the basis of traditions ranging from the I-Ching (Book of Changes) to geomancy (the favourable attributes and aspects of land that still inspire architectural design in Asia), and it followed the art of Yin and Yang (the qualitative masculine and feminine spirit that resided in all things). The director of divination had 2 vice-directors, 2 professors, 2 assistant professors, 37 technicians, and 45 students. On the twelve-rung scale of the civil service, the astrological directors held posts fifth from the top; experts in calendar-making ranked ninth, and experts in timekeeping apparently had no rating at all.

The apprentice system in Thang astronomy led into middle-management positions. The enterprise departed from a strict technical meritocracy, because directors were parachuted in from outside the bureau. And as foreigners came to carry out many of the calculations, there was little interest at the top or at the bottom in accuracy, fidelity, or innovation. With the exception of the foreign calculators, this institutional structure, modified and diminished in size, also took root in eighth-century Japan, where astronomical knowledge became the domain of a few families and where the dominant Chinese focus on calendar-making ceded to portent astrology.

The structure of astronomy at Chinese observatories separated calendrical mathematics from practical problems of terrestrial mensuration. Chinese maps followed a grid, for example, but unlike Ptolemy’s geography the grid was not keyed to astronomical measurements. There was a small mathematics school founded during the Thang period. Its professors did not rank high in the civil service, and the students were not destined for administrative posts. Sons of minor officials and commoners, the students did not have access to other schools; with their ‘Master of Mathematics’ diploma, they anticipated a career as land surveyor. To an extent even greater than in medieval Europe, Chinese society separated mathematical scholars and mathematical craftsmen.

In both Chinese and Islamic civilizations, the motivation for observing the skies related to legitimizing state authority, which promoted (or at least guaranteed) a faith. Both Chinese and Islamic rulers had heavenly mandates, and it was only natural to read heaven’s signs in the stars. The reign of a Chinese potentate often began with a new, star-informed calendar. The prayers of an Islamic caliph were regulated by the sun and moon, and his life was foretold by the remaining planets. Notwithstanding a divergent interpretation of celestial signs, observatories provided essential information both East and West.

We may identify a progressive evolution of techniques at both Islamic and Chinese observatories. There was in fact persistent interchange of techniques between the two civilizations: al-Khayyami reinterpreted what he thought were Chinese mathematical techniques, and Nasîr al-Tusî received an invitation to Beijing or Qaraqurum. Nevertheless, foreign knowledge (such as the Persian, Manichaean, and Nestorian texts that were translated into Chinese during the eighth century) eventually disappeared. One finds, for example, no trace of Ptolemaïc notions in Chinese texts. Chinese astronomers may have been instrumental in setting up one or another Islamic observatory, but we see nothing of Chinese norms in Central Asian astronomy.

Why? Because astronomy was a state secret and a clan monopoly, foreign astronomers found an ephemeral place in China. The astronomical sciences – astrology, navigation, cartography – could be prosecuted for the most part only under imperial authority; data, methods, and calculations were not available in the public sphere.

In the record of those times when astronomical innovations came to Asia and the Islamic world, however, we see another part of the answer. Innovation in the sciences of observation occurs in the context of aggressive expansion. When a civilization is actively assimilating foreign peoples and exotic cultures, traditional notions of all kinds are subject to modification. The scientific fruit of this expansive vision appears in Hellenistic Alexandria, tenth-century Salerno, thirteenth-century France, Renaissance Italy, Restoration England, eighteenth-century Scotland, and twentieth-century America.

Innovation in instruments

What were the innovations in astronomical instruments between the ancient observers of Stonehenge and the comparably majestic observatory on Hven where Tycho Brahe brought classical, Ptolemaïc astronomy to its apogee? Among the innovations of the Istanbul Observatory was a mechanical clock based on a European design. (Tycho, it may be noted, did not consider mechanical clocks reliable for astronomical work.) Clocks of all kinds flooded the Ottoman world during the sixteenth century, even though they were ill-suited for indicating prayer times, just as they streamed into East Asia as goodwill offerings of European ambassadors and missionaries. Only with Christiaan Huygens’s pendulum clock and the precise chronometers of the eighteenth century did regular, mechanical timepieces enter the observatory.

The astrolabe, perfected in medieval Islam, became a useful navigational device, and its precise scales – stamped and engraved on brass – could be employed for determining planetary positions, as could various wooden cross-staffs of European origin. Brass was also worked into armillary spheres, which allowed for a simultaneous measurement of celestial latitude and longitude. The sphere itself, more cumbersome than useful, could be reduced to a two-dimensional circle or part of a circle. When of large proportions, like the six-foot-radius quarter circle used by Tycho, the instrument could be fixed to a wall and adapted for taking altitude and meridian transits simultaneously. The gradual evolution of instruments, pioneered by professional astronomers, led directly to heliocentric, celestial mechanics: Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) began his reformation of astronomy because he focused on an 8-minute-of-arc discrepancy between Tycho’s observations and traditional calculations.

Observational practice, in particular the use of meridian transit instruments, guaranteed that Tycho’s notion of an observatory would continue to the end of the nineteenth century. The Paris Observatory, for example, took shape in the late seventeenth century as a residential mansion where quadrants, octants, and the new telescopes perambulated to an outdoor terrace. Telescopes went on the roof from the beginning, and wings were added for additional telescopes. In the nineteenth century, advances in metalworking made possible lightweight movable domes, which could enclose permanently mounted telescopic leviathans.

Small instruments evolved slowly and continually at least since the time of Ptolemy, but the large ones changed hardly at all. Innovations derived from star-watchers who needed to determine time and place. The astrolabe, invented in the Mediterranean around the fourth century, responded to the requirements of sailors and astrologers and especially to the men of affluence who underwrote the voyages and horoscopes. With its plates for various latitudes, the astrolabe provided a picture of the fixed stars in stereoscopic projection, and its obverse served to sight the altitude of celestial objects. A serious student of the stars, realizing the limitation by latitude of such a calculating device, would seek to generalize it; the universal astrolabe appeared by the eleventh century in Toledo. It would be obvious to a frequent user, furthermore, that one needed only a quarter-circle for determining time and place; as we have seen, quadrants of this kind enjoyed popularity by the fourteenth century.

The utility of devices like the astrolabe depended on the precision of their lines and scales and the regularity of their moving parts. Precision related to the rise of a craft tradition that eventually led to the emergence of professional instrument-makers. With the Renaissance, precision replaced figurative allusion as a rhapsody for people in the workaday world, and the prime measure of precise movement, the stars, attracted increasing attention. The growth of commerce and banking brought number – and its various transformations from one to another currency or system of weight and measure – to wider circles. Marine commerce with Asia and the New World generated demand for maps and navigational instruments. Calendrical reform assumed crisis proportions as feasts and anniversaries no longer corresponded with the seasons. Astrology became important in daily affairs as religious heterodoxy conveyed doubt and uncertainty about humanity’s place in the cosmos.

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