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You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Fox Robert 2013Texts and imagesNotes Rec. R. Soc.6797–99http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2013.0018SectionYou have accessEditorialTexts and images Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:27 March 2013https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2013.0018Other version(s) of this articleYou are viewing the most recent version of this article. Previous versions: January 1, 2013: Previous Version 1 The gradual abandonment of Latin as the universal language of the world of learning was a long process. Felicity Henderson's ‘Faithful interpreters?’ in this issue examines a stage in the process, during the early years of the Royal Society, in which correspondents' relatively novel use of European vernaculars was making translations increasingly necessary if communications were to be read with ease. As Henderson shows, translation was not a straightforward matter. Agreement on the need for the faithful rendering of scientific texts went hand in hand with a diversity of practices. Translators with a more literary bent, for example, tended to favour freer translations that would convey the ‘spirit’ of the original, whereas others left the mark of their scientific expertise on translations that bore a measure of ‘dual authority’, their own as well as that of the authors whose texts they were handling. ‘Faithfulness’, as these practices show, was often achieved, and arguably better achieved, through procedures distinct from word-for-word translation.In the seventeenth century, as in later periods, illustrations were no less important than texts as vehicles of communication. Pursuing a theme treated by herself and others in recent issues of Notes and Records, Sachiko Kusukawa throws new light on the passage from an original drawing to its reproduction in print.1 The case she examines is that of five previously unpublished drawings of fossils by Robert Hooke, with two by Richard Waller, that appeared in due course as plates in Hooke's Posthumous works (1705). Although Waller's drawings are of high quality, Hooke's demonstrate an exceptional skill in conveying the details and contours of his specimens through the application of a variety of washes and the skilful use of ink lines. The resulting intaglio plates are certainly fine. Yet they do not convey the delicacy of originals that, as Kusukawa shows, were worthy (in Hooke's case) of a former pupil of Sir Peter Lely.Looking back over the 75 years of the existence of Notes and Records, the increasing prominence of visual elements, both as illustrative material and as objects of study, is striking. Many of the finest illustrations that have appeared in the journal are drawn from the Royal Society's own collections, which continue to grow (as with the accession of the recently catalogued papers of Sir John Vane2), although with occasional losses along the way. In this issue, Keith Moore draws attention to four (possibly five) seventeenth-century portraits of Fellows that have disappeared, losses that have come to light recently in the recataloguing of the Society's oil paintings. A celebrated image of a different kind is Hokusai's nineteenth-century woodcut The great wave off Kanagawa. In their discussion of the woodcut and the phenomenon it represents, J. M. Dudley, V. Sarano and F. Dias take up a question raised in earlier issues of Notes and Records. In particular, they offer a discussion that complements the interpretation of the wave as a large storm wave on the point of breaking (rather than a tsunami) by Julyan Cartwright and Hisami Nakamura.3For some years now, Notes and Records has begun each issue with an image, normally drawn from the Royal Society Library. The frontispiece in this issue reproduces the spectrum of radium emanation photographed by Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Royds in 1908 in the painstaking research that allowed them (to their evident satisfaction) to take one step ahead of William Ramsay, who was engaged on similar work. Rutherford and Royds were working at what was now the Victoria University of Manchester (after its initial founding as Owens College) in a remarkable period that saw the university confirm its status as a centre of scientific research of international importance. One of the contributors to that eminence was Horace Lamb, a highly placed Cambridge wrangler who held the Elder Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide before his appointment as professor of pure mathematics at Manchester in 1885 and his subsequent move to the Beyer Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics there three years later. As Brian Launder shows, the circumstances of Lamb's appointment to the pure mathematics chair were ‘curious’. Launder's evidence, drawn chiefly from archives in Manchester and Adelaide, displays the impact of distance and what by our standards were painfully slow communications in the late nineteenth century. Although the telegraph did something to alleviate the difficulty, a journey-time of six weeks between Britain and Australia left the process of applying for a post across the world a cumbersome business. What might have been a straightforward sequence—application, the gathering of testimonials, and interview—proved anything but straightforward. An initial plan to give Lamb time to make the journey from Adelaide was abandoned, and without further delay the Council of Owens College offered him the chair. To Manchester's enduring benefit, Lamb stayed in post until his retirement in 1920.That we should be carrying contributions relevant to science in Manchester is timely. When this June 2013 issue appears, historians of science will be preparing for the 24th International Congress of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS), to be held there between 22 and 28 July. These congresses, which are one of the main responsibilities of the IUHPS as a member union of the International Council of Science (ICSU), have a long history, going back to the first of them, which took place under the auspices of the International Committee of Historical Sciences in Oslo in 1928. Now held every four years and last held in Britain in Edinburgh in 1977, they have contributed much to the acceptance of the history of science as an academic discipline across the world. The path to acceptance has not been an untroubled one, as Vannevar Bush's dismissal of the pioneering work of George Sarton as ‘irrelevant’ reminds us.4 But we have come a very long way since Bush made his comment (and halved the Carnegie Trust's subsidy for the journal Isis) in the 1940s. A large congress on the general theme of ‘Knowledge at work’ is in prospect for Manchester,5 and all of us with an interest in the history of science will wish it every success.FootnotesNotes1 Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Historia piscium’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 54, 179–197 (2000), and ‘Picturing knowledge in the early Royal Society: the examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 65, 273–294 (2011); Matthew C. Hunter, ‘Hooke's figurations: a figural drawing attributed to Robert Hooke’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 64, 251–260 (2010); Anna Marie Roos, ‘The art of science: a “rediscovery” of the Lister copperplates’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 66, 19–40 (2012); and Meghan C. Doherty, ‘Discovering the “true form”: Hooke's Micrographia and the visual vocabulary of engraved portraits’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 66, 211–234 (2012).2 See Fiona Keates's report on the Vane papers in this issue.3 J. H. E. Cartwright and H. Nakamura, ‘What kind of a wave is Hokusai's Great wave off Kanagawa?’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 63, 119–135 (2009). See also Cartwright and Nakamura, ‘Tsunami: a history of the term and of scientific understanding of the phenomenon in Japanese and Western culture’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 62, 151–166 (2008).4 Robert Fox, ‘On receiving a first copy of Notes and Records: George Sarton to A. V. Hill, 24 February 1942’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 67, 165–168 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2013.0015.5 Further details are on the congress's website at http://www.ichstm2013.com/© 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 June 2013Volume 67Issue 2 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2013.0018PubMed:24686271Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online27/03/2013Published in print20/06/2013 License:© 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. Citations and impact