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