Published in 1934 The New Background of Science took advantage of a comparatively 'quiescent' period in physical investigation when fundamental theories and findings gained wide acceptance.

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and President of the Royal Society, Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819 1904) made substantial contributions to the fields of fluid dynamics, optics, physics, and geodesy, in which numerous discoveries still bear his name. The Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bart., edited by Joseph Larmor, offers rare insight into this capacious scientific mind, with letters attesting to the careful, engaged experimentation that earned him international acclaim. Volume 2 (1907) includes important professional correspondence...

The mathematician and physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (1824 1907) was one of Britain's most influential scientists, famous for his work on the first and second laws of thermodynamics and for devising the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature. Silvanus P. Thompson (1851 1916) began this biography with the co-operation of Kelvin in 1906, but the project was interrupted by Kelvin's death the following year. Thompson, himself a respected physics lecturer and scientific writer, decided that a more comprehensive biography would be needed and spent several years reading through Kelvin's...

The Royal Society has been dedicated to scientific inquiry since the seventeenth century and has seen a long line of illustrious scientists and thinkers among its fellowship. The society's Assistant Secretary and Librarian, Charles Richard Weld (1813 1869), spent four years writing this two-volume History of the Royal Society, published in 1848, which also includes illustrations by his wife, Anne. Weld's aim was to document the 'rise, progress, and constitution' of the society. He charts how the informal meetings of like-minded men engaged in scientific pursuits in the mid-1600s developed...

The American social historian and antiquarian Alice Morse Earle (1851 1911) published this lavishly illustrated book, among the last of her works, in 1902. By this time she had developed a distinctive style of historical writing which made innovative use of material evidence in its focus on the details of everyday life. She was particularly interested in family and society in colonial America, and her views about the importance of ancestry were reflected in her membership of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her fascination for beautiful things found lively...

Born in Switzerland, Louis Agassiz (1807 73) distinguished himself as one of the most capable and industrious naturalists of the nineteenth century, working in fields as diverse as ichthyology and glaciology. In the late 1840s, he moved to North America, where he became a professor of zoology at Harvard and established the Museum of Comparative Zoology. His extensive bibliography of all known works relating to zoology and geology, which he had compiled for private use, was revised and substantially expanded by the English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811 53) and published by the Ray...

The Austrian scientist Ernst Mach (1838 1916) carried out work of importance in many fields of enquiry, including physics, physiology, psychology and philosophy. Published in this English translation of 1906, these essays examine geometry from three different perspectives. Mach argues that, as our ideas about space are created by the senses and how we experience our environment, researchers must not consider the subject from a mathematical standpoint alone. In the first essay, he explains how humans generate spatial concepts. Next, he discusses the psychology of geometry, its empirical...

Professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution between 1853 and 1887, the British physicist and mountaineer John Tyndall (1820 93) passionately sought to share scientific understanding with the Victorian public. A lucid and highly regarded communicator, he lectured on such topics as heat, light, magnetism and electricity. In this collection of eight lectures, first published in 1867, Tyndall explains numerous acoustic phenomena for a non-specialist audience. Emphasising the practical nature of scientific enquiry, he describes experiments throughout and includes many illustrations of...

In 1876 the South Kensington Museum held a major international exhibition of scientific instruments and equipment, both historical and contemporary. Many of the items eventually formed the basis of collections now held at London's Science Museum. In May 1876, organisers arranged a series of conferences at which leading British and European scientists explained and demonstrated some of the items on display. The purpose was to emphasise the exhibition's goal not merely to preserve archaic treasures (such as Galileo's telescopes or Janssen's microscope) but to juxtapose them with current...