Landmarks of science

Stories of Great British Men and their Great Feats of engineering - diverting the Thames, draining vast swamps, etc. A very popular work at the time, extolling the will and spirit of heroic figures, turning acts of engineering into ripping tales.

Book digitized by Google from the library of University of Lausanne and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck is remembered primarily as a pre-Darwinian evolutionist who proposed the inheritance of acquired characters to explain evolutionary change. But this narrow view of Lamarck does not do justice to his conception of organic change, nor does it indicate how Lamarck's views on organic change related to the rest of his biological thinking. This edition of Lamarck's most famous treatise, the Zoological Philosophy, provides an opportunity to reconsider this major work of 19th-century biology. It includes as well Lamarck's "Introductory Discourse" of 1800 and Cuvier's infamous "Biographical Memoir," an attack on Lamarck that has been the source of common misconceptions about his work. Introductory essays by David L. Hull and Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., discuss Lamarck's contributions in the context of his time and reassess their significance for the development of evolutionary theory. - Back cover.

J. L. Lagrange is a name well known to students in all branches of mathematics and applied mathematics. But by far his most famous work deals with mechanics - the Mecanique Analytique. In this work, he used the Principle of Virtual Work as the foundation for all of mechanics and thereby brought together statics, hydrostatics, dynamics and hydrodynamics. His approach differed significantly from the mechanics of Newton and the physical approach to mechanics of Laplace and Poisson. The difference is due primarily to the introduction by Lagrange of a fictitious constraint force. The purpose of the constraint force is to enforce an algebraic relation between the coordinates of the parts of a continuous body or between various bodies. Moreover, the physical origin of this force does not have to be known. From this point, Lagrange utilizes the methodology of the Calculus of Variations - a methodology which he himself developed - to vary the configuration of a system in statics or the path of a system in dynamics in order to obtain the governing differential equations. Audience: Historians of science, mathematicians, physicists and engineers, and scholars specializing in classical mechanics, celestial mechanics, mathematics of mechanics and mechanics in general.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne refuting the common errors and superstitions of his age. It first appeared in 1646 and went through five subsequent editions, the last revision occurring in 1672. The work includes evidence of Browne's adherence to the Baconian method of empirical observation of nature, and was in the vanguard of work-in-progress scientific journalism in the 17th century scientific revolution, though he refers to his work as an encyclopaedia. Throughout its pages frequent examples of Browne's subtle humour can also be found. Browne's three determinants for obtaining truth were firstly, the authority of past authors, secondly, the act of reason and lastly, empirical experience. Each of these determinants are employed upon subjects ranging from the cosmological to common folklore. Subjects covered in Pseudodoxia are arranged in the time-honoured Renaissance scale of creation, the learned doctor assaying to dispel errors and fallacies concerning the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms before moving to errors pictorial, to those of man, geography, astronomy and finally of the cosmos.