Instrument provision and geographical science: the work of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830-ca 1930.

This paper examines the Royal Geographical Society's provision and management of scientific instruments to explorers and expeditions in the century following its foundation in 1830. Assessment of the Society's directives concerning appropriate scientific instruments for the conduct of geography reveals the emergence (slow and uneven) of policies concerning the assignment of instruments. From examination of Council minutes and related manuscript sources, the paper documents the numbers of instruments acquired by the Society, by whom used, for what scientific purpose and in which parts of the world. The paper examines the number and chronology of expeditions supported by the Society's instruments, examines the expenditure upon instruments' repair, and discusses the publications that followed their use in exploration. Correspondence between instrument users and the Society reveals that, on occasion, the use of instruments was adventitious. While geographical knowledge depended upon the use of scientific instruments to measure and to depict the world, geography was not a formally institutionalized survey science as was the case with the Geological Survey or the nation-defining mapping of Ordnance Survey.

Science and sociability: women as audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901.

This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of popularizers. The essay argues that, in various ways, the ubiquitous and visible female audience came to define the BAAS audience and "the public" for science more generally. The women who swelled the BAAS audiences were accepted as a social element within the meetings even as they were regarded critically as scientific participants. Portrayed as passive and nonscientific, women allowed the male scientific elites to distance themselves from their audiences. Arguing from diary and other evidence, we present examples that complicate existing notions of audiences for science as necessarily active.