The Illustrated London News (ILN) published a regular column on science in society from the late 1880s. Titled under various labels, “Science Jottings”, “Science and Natural History”, “The World of Science”, this column sought to provide the British public with a scientific engagement of the world around them. From the late 1880s to 1946 the column was written by five men, curating the scientific knowledge of the ILN’s readership. The first editor, Dr. Andrew Wilson, wrote in April 1906 that “Science reigns supreme” given the “widespread range of interests … with which she is largely concerned”. Wilson’s claim was that science proliferated into every tendril of society and was indispensable to present-day living and it was the column’s mandate to detail how. In order to cover the vast expanse of science, topics jumped from crime one week to morals the next followed by noise and dust. This paper explores the ILN’s science column from the late 1880s to 1946 to understand how five science editors defined and mapped out the contours of the concept of “science” in the British public in a haphazard and undirected manner. The ILN was one of the most read periodicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing a good case study for exploring the spread of scientific knowledge in society. At the core of this paper, I reflect on the role of periodicals in disseminating “soundbites” of science and the “chatter” they created at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Established in 1834 for the collection of facts, the Statistical Society of London (SSL) played a central role in the moulding of statistical facts. The SSL defined statistical facts as the aggregation of numerous observations and reduced the value of single observations to isolated facts that alone could not be accepted as evidence. For the production of statistical facts, the SSL promoted two measures: conducting a coordinated observation to collect new facts and gleaning facts from existing literature. While the SSL left the former to governments, it devoted its resources to fostering the latter. To fulfil this mission, the Journal of the Statistical Society of London (JSSL) was created in 1838 as a virtual storehouse of existing facts where one could find facts of interest. The JSSL allowed individuals to share their small-scale observations for further aggregation as well as to publish statistical tables compiled from scattered facts that were already published elsewhere. As with its contemporaries, the JSSL was designed to serve posterity, which led the journal to include what apparently bore little importance at the time but might be of interest to readers in the distant future. The journal’s scientific missions resulted in the JSSL’s acceptance to publish colourless articles that provided no hypothesis, no conclusion and even no ‘original’ data. This paper explores how the new concept of facts in statistics shaped the practice of writing and reading among statisticians through the examination of the JSSL’s creation.

In the early modern period, most scholarly works (as well as many maps, instruments, etc.) included a printed dedication. Historians of science have studied such dedications mainly as a window on patronage relationships. That aspect is important, but cannot be the whole story. After all, most reeditions still included the original dedications, even when at the time of publication the original dedicator and dedicatee were long dead. In this paper, I will offer a more nuanced view on the function of dedications. I will briefly discuss the genre in general and present some concrete examples, notably the work of the Dutch mathematician (and contemporary of Galileo) Simon Stevin. It will appear that the function of dedications was much more ambiguous than is often assumed.