Worldwide ConnectionsAuthor(s): Alan CookSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 55, No. 2 (May, 2001), p. 183Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/532093 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 55 (2), 183 (2001)

WORLDWIDE CONNECTIONS

Our covers with Isaac Newton last year and Charles Darwin (with Emma) on this and our next issue, reflect the inclusion of items about each of those two giants of science in almost every issue of Notes and Records. In this part there are three papers and a book review concerning Newton and a review of an important book about Darwin, all demonstrating that extensive and lively scholarly studies of Newton and Darwin continue seemingly inexhaustibly.

There are, however, other topics that recur in our pages, one of which is the worldwide connections of The Royal Society from its earliest days. The paper on the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Raman follows others on Indian science, including one on the discovery of the Raman effect itself and one on the first telegraph across India. The Royal Society and Russia is another matter on which there have been earlier papers. Mme du Chatelet's translation of the Principia into French, considered in this issue, links Newton and Europe, for it was both the outcome of Newton's methods by a few French mathematicians such as Maupertuis and Clairaut and Mme du Chatelet herself, and the means of propagating those ideas more generally in France and Italy. Her married name obscures Mme du Chatelet's lineage as Gabrielle- Emilie de Breteuil, the daughter of a most distinguished administrative family still continuing in France. Another of the family was the minister who arranged for French surveyors to take part with the British Ordnance Survey in connecting the surveys in the two countries across the English Channel.

The Wilkins Lecture of The Royal Society is given every two years on a subject in the history of science and is normally published in Notes and Records. In this issue we have the lecture for the year 2000 by Professor Roy Porter, appropriately for the end of the millennium on predictions and speculations in medicine. We also publish the lecture by Professor Lisa Jardine, who is writing a biography of Christopher Wren, on the interaction of art and science in his architectural works.

Sir Alan Cook

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© 2001 The Royal Society

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