Abstract In 1746 the case of a young woman vomiting stones, nails, glasses and other foreign bodies came to the notice of the general scientific and religious communities. The Bishop of Cremona, Alessandro Maria Litta (1671–1754), deemed that a scientific–medical approach was necessary. Paolo Valcarenghi (d. 1780), one of the most famous of Cremona’s physicians, was charged with this task. Many physicians, both local and from the wider area of Northern Italy, became actively involved in the discussion: Martino Ghisi (1715–1794), who was the first to describe diphtheria on a scientific basis; Carlo Francesco Cogrossi (1682–1769, Professor of Practical Medicine at Padua University), who is noted for his parasitic theory of contagion; Carlo Gandini (1705–1788), who introduced some typical traditional Chinese Medicine practices into Italian medicine; and Francesco Roncalli Parolino (1692–1769), who recorded the case in his work entitled Europae medicina a sapientibus illustrata et a comite Francisco Roncalli Parolino observationibus adaucta (1747), a foundational work in the reconstruction of medical praxis in Europe. Their work is amongst the earliest texts from the Italian Peninsula to deny the natural formation of stones in the stomach, with the debate between the religious and scientific communities resulting in the acceptance of the medical explanation.

Abstract In the latter part of the 18th century some of Britain's eastern coastal defences, although strategically well-positioned, were vulnerable because of the lack of a secure water supply. The military engineer Captain Thomas Hyde Page was tasked with identifying any water resources within the confines of the forts and garrisons that might be developed. At Sheerness he supervised the sinking of a deep, large-diameter well through the London Clay, which tapped water in underlying sands. The idea of a deep well was possibly influenced by the results of deepening a well at nearby Queenborough Castle some 60 years before. At Landguard Fort he constructed an infiltration gallery that skimmed water from the upper surface of a thin freshwater lens. At Harwich he sank two simple shallow wells to abstract water from beneath the London Clay. At each locality he used a different solution appropriate to local hydrogeological conditions. Although some of his ideas were outdated, he recognized that fresh water appeared to be floating on underlying salt water and speculated that this might be the result of differences in specific gravity. His work was important in publicizing the use of groundwater and foreshadowed the major developments of the following century.

Abstract It is generally believed that before the Enlightenment earthquakes were considered as signs of the wrath of God as punishment for men's sins, and that Earth tremors were not considered as natural occurrences until modern times. However, this is an oversimplification, as we can see in Spanish writings of the 17th and 18th centuries. In these writings we have to distinguish between popular and religious documents and academic studies. In the 17th century Spanish authors held the Aristotelian doctrine about earthquakes and regarded them as natural occurrences. Some regarded them as God's punishment for sinful people. The occurrence of a destructive earthquake in Malaga in 1680 brought this question into the open. At that time no opinions were presented against the religious interpretation. The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 and the subsequent tsunami caused considerable damage in many Spanish cities, and the earthquake was felt throughout Spain. After that earthquake an abundant literature of popular, religious, philosophical and scientific character was published. A strong controversy arose as to whether the earthquake was of natural or supernatural character, with theologians and philosophers on both sides. An important group defended the natural character of the occurrence and deplored the exaggerated position of their opponents.

Abstract The 17th and 18th centuries were periods when all the sciences began to develop and men of science showed an interest in what began later to grow into significant ways of looking at the Earth, the composition of its crust and the life forms inhabiting it. The political, social, economic and religious events of those times acted as helping influences on the way that all knowledge grew and developed, but also provided some limitations on the ways that scientific knowledge was pursued. The 18th century became widely known as ‘the Age of Enlightenment’, as it marked the ending of ignorance and darkness, but there were developments in 17th century European culture and knowledge that foreshadowed this. This paper concentrates on the work of two men of 17th century science who assisted the rise of interest in those evidences of the past life on our planet that would later become the sciences of Palaeontology and Palaeobotany. Robert Plot and Edward Lhwyd were the first custodians of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and their work demonstrates that such institutions did much to advance our scientific knowledge. Although three of their contemporaries, Robert Hooke, Nicolaus Steno and John Woodward, firmly believed that fossils were of organic origin, both Plot and Lhwyd opposed these views and developed their own explanations, yet, nevertheless, produced some accurate descriptions of fossils from both animal and plant sources. Lhwyd, in particular, was very hardworking and successful in his early attempts at classification. Later in the 18th century, Richard Brookes, MD used much of their work in a highly successful compilation of current knowledge, a six-volume work on Natural History. In this he was assisted by one of the literary geniuses of his time, Oliver Goldsmith. This was an important advance in the popularization of Natural Science

Abstract From ancient times through to the Renaissance reports of stones, fragments of iron and ‘six hundred other things’ fallen from the sky were written down in books. With few exceptions, these were taken as signals of heaven's wrath. The 18th century Enlightenment brought an entirely new approach in which savants sought rational explanations, based on the laws of physics, for unfamiliar phenomena. They accepted Isaac Newton's dictum of 1718 that outer space must be empty in order to perpetuate the laws of gravitation, and, at the same time, they rejected an old belief that stones can coalesce within the atmosphere. Logically, then, nothing could fall from the skies, except ejecta from volcanoes or objects picked up by hurricanes. They dismissed reports of fallen stones or irons as tales told by superstitious country folk, and ascribed stones with black crusts to bolts of lightning on pyritiferous rocks. The decade between 1794 and 1804 witnessed a dramatic advance from rejection to acceptance of meteorites. The three main contributing factors were E.F.F. Chladni's book of 1794, in which he argued for the actuality of falls and linked them with fireballs; the occurrence of four witnessed and widely publicized falls of stones between 1794 and 1798; and chemical and mineralogicai analyses of stones and irons, published in 1802 by Edward C. Howard and Jacques-Louis de Bournon. They showed that stones with identical textures and compositions, very different from those of common rocks, have fallen at different times in widely separated parts of the world. They also showed that erratic masses of metallic iron and small grains of iron in the stones both contain nickel, so they must share a common origin. Meanwhile, in 1789, Anton-Laurent de Lavoisier had revived the idea of the accretion of stones within the atmosphere, which became widely accepted. Its chief rival was a hypothesis that fallen stones were erupted by volcanoes on the Moon. During the first half of the 19th century falls of carbonaceous chondrites and achondrites, and observations on the metallography of irons, provided fresh insights on the range of compositions of meteorite parent bodies. By 1860 both of the two main hypotheses of origins were abandoned, and debates intensified on whether all meteorites were fragments of asteroids or some of them originated in interstellar space. This paper will trace some of the successes and some of the failures that marked the efforts to gain a better understanding of meteorite falls from the end of the 15th century to the early 20th century.

The Cape Granites are a granitic suite intruded into Neoproterozoic greywackes and slates, and unconformably overlain by early Palaeozoic Table Mountain Group orthoquartzites. They were first recognised at Paarl in 1776 by Francis Masson, and by William Anderson and William Hamilton in 1778. Studies of the Cape Granites were central to some of the early debates between the Wernerian Neptunists (Robert Jameson and his former pupils) and the Huttonian Plutonists (John Playfair, Basil Hall, Charles Darwin), in the first decades of the 19th Century, since it is at the foot of Table Mountain that the first intrusive granites outside of Scotland were described by Hall in 1812. The Neptunists believed that all rocks, including granite and basalt, were precipitated from the primordial oceans, whereas the Plutonists believed in the intrusive origin of some igneous rocks, such as granite. In this paper, some of the early descriptions and debates concerning the Cape Granites are reviewed, and the history of the development of ideas on granites (as well as on contact metamorphism and sea level changes) at the Cape in the late 18th Century and early to mid 19th Century, during the emerging years of the discipline of geology, is presented for the first time.

Abstract Laterza (southern Italy) was the most important town for the manufacture of Apulian majolica ceramic from the 16th century until the end of the 18th century. The Laterza majolicas have previously been subjected to only preliminary analyses. This study extends the archaeometric knowledge of the Laterza productions with mineralogical, petrographical and chemical characterizations of ceramic body, glazed coating and pigments of the majolica. A number of 16th to 19th century pottery and tile fragments of majolica have been studied and compared with clay from local and surrounding deposits. Analyses were carried out by optical microscope, scanning electron microscope, energy-dispersive spectrometry, X-ray powder diffraction, X-ray fluorescence and inductively coupled plasma. A purification process of the raw material is suggested and for some fragments, doubtfully attributed to Laterza, a different place of manufacture. Slip (‘ingobbio’) was never found under the glaze. Si, Pb and Sn are confirmed as the principal elements in the tin-glazed coatings. The differences in the glaze opacity were attributed to different manufacturing techniques and not simply the quantity of tin. The orange–yellow colour is due to a Sb–Pb compound; black to Ni with a lower amount of Co, Fe and Sb; blue to Co, As, Fe and Ni; and Mn is the pigment of the violet–brown.