Gérard and Antoinette de Vaucouleurs are among the most prominent and respected astronomers of this century. This volume was put together by a number of his friends and colleagues to mark the occasion of Gérard de Vaucouleurs' 70th birthday and consequent retirement from his chair at the University of Texas, Austin. It is dedicated to the memory of Antoinette de Vaucouleurs.

In his lifetime, John Herschel was Britain’s best-known natural philosopher, a world celebrity, and arguably the first modern scientist of the generation in which the term itself was invented. The polymath son of William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and constructor of the world’s largest telescopes, Herschel took highest honors as a student at Cambridge, conducted groundbreaking work in chemistry and optics, helped establish a mathematical revolution, extended his father’s astronomical surveys to the entire sky, and wrote the popular texts by which a generation of readers learned what it meant to do science. Along the way, Herschel gave to natural philosophy the contours of modern science, defining scientific theories as “creatures of reason rather than of sense.” His creatures of reason could also refer to a new type of scientific practitioner: the natural philosopher beginning to transition into the modern scientist. With this book, Stephen Case encompasses Herschel’s impact on mathematics, chemistry, geology, and optics as well as the organization of science and its relation to government, society, and culture, revealing Herschel’s transformation of the practice of science itself. Drawing on his unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and notebooks from archives in London, Cambridge, and Austin, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the early life and career of the nineteenth century’s most influential natural philosopher.

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew. Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.