From a distance the Mark 1 radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is an edifying sight. It is a steel structure of over 1000 tons, holding aloft a fully steerable dish of wire mesh which focuses incoming radio waves from astronomical objects. It is set in gently rolling Cheshire countryside. Its striking appearance can easily be recruited as a powerful symbol of progress and of science as the pursuit of pioneering spirits.

A count of articles by women listed in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800–1900, the nineteen-volume international index brought out by the Royal Society, produced a collection of almost 4000 titles of papers by about 1000 nineteenth-century women authors. Out of 181 geology papers in this collection, 118 (65 per cent) were by British women (see Table 1, columns 1 and 2). This finding is especially remarkable when considered against the more general background of nineteenth-century women's work in science (at least as judged from women's contributions to the journal literature indexed by the Royal Society). In most fields American workers considerably outnumbered British and published many more papers. Geology, however, is an exception, with the British dominating the field by a wide margin. This essay discusses a number of the British women of the period who carried out work in geology, and offers some suggestions that go toward explaining their striking prominence among their contemporaries.

This paper is about how the motto of the Royal Society has sometimes been misread, but it is also about how such a misreading could arise at all, and why it persists. I argue that the error is intimately associated with a traditional view of scientific language as a medium for descriptive reporting, a view which has been very influential in schools, and is consequently perpetuated in the public understanding of science. Much new scholarship confirms that this ‘straightforward’ view of what scientists do can no longer be accepted at face value, and that the role of language in science is more intimate and subtle in its interpretive and persuasive qualities. A renewed study of the motto is interesting in itself, but it will also serve to introduce these wider matters. Perhaps it may help some more teachers to escape from those received ideas about language which have restricted the range of learning activities in school science, and discouraged a full attention to the words in which scientists choose to express their ideas.

The four-year wrangle over the ownership of what was then thought to have been the largest known meteorite, recognized near Melbourne in 1860, provides a fine-grained example of the interaction between scientific internationalism, metropolitan appetite for specimens, and colonial civic pride.

Kepler saw it as one of the chief advantages of the Copernican system that it put order into the planetary motions. Although Copernicus had indeed noted that the planetary periods increase with their distance from the sun, he did not, as far as we know, attempt to find a relationship between the two. Believing that God would not have failed to establish some mathematically precise ratio, Kepler sought from the very first to find it. Thus we see, in some of his earliest surviving letters, his attempts to relate planetary periods to the radii of their orbits using circular quadrants intersected by straight lines. Right from the beginning, Kepler gave the sun that dynamic role that was to characterize his ‘new astronomy based upon physics’. Immediately after describing the nested polyhedra that he believed determined the number and distances of the planets, he wrote:

Next, there is a moving soul and an infinite motion in the sun, and a double decrement of motion in the movables. In the first place, there is the inequality of their circuits, caused by the unequal amplitude of the orbs, which would occur even were the moving power the same in all orbs. But (2) actually this moving power (like light, in optics) is weaker the further it is from the source.