The Light of Nature

One: Medicine and the Life Sciences.- 1. Development of Medical Education among the Arabic-speaking Peoples.- 2. Gentile da Foligno and the Via Medicorum.- 3. Some Assumptions behind Medicine for the Poor during the Reign of Louis XIV.- 4. Buffon's Histoire naturelle as a Work of the Enlightenment.- 5. Adam Gottlob Schirach's Experiments on Bees.- 6. William Swainson: Types, Circles, and Affinities.- 7. A Retrospoct on the Historiography of the Life Sciences.- Two: Astronomy and Natural Philosophy.- 8. Two Astronomical Tractates of Abbo of Fleury.- 9. Pseudo-Euclid on the Position of the Image in Reflection: Interpretations by an Anonymous Commentator, by Pena, and by Kepler.- 10. Thomas Harriot's Papers on the Calendar.- 11. Thomas Harriot's Observations of Halley's Comet in 1607.- 12. Animadversions on the Origins of the Microscope.- 13. Hemsterhuis on Mathematics and Optics.- Three: The Social Framework.- 14. Galileians in Sicily: a Hitherto Unpublished Correspondence of Daniele Spinola with Domenico Catalano in Messina (1650-1652).- 15. A Friend of Hobbes and an Early Translator of Galileo: Robert Payne of Oxford.- 16. Descartes and the English.- 17. From Corfu to Caledonia: the Early Travels of Charles Dupin, 1808-1820.- 18. A Scotswoman Abroad: Mary Somervillc's 1817 Visit to France.- Four: Styles in the History of Ideas.- 19. Rationality and the Generalization of Scientific Style.- 20. The Idea of the Decay of the World in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha.- 21. Science in Antiquity: the Indian Perspective.- 22. System-building in the Eighteenth Century.- 23. Elements in the Structure of Victorian Science, or Cannon Revisited.- A Bibliography of the Writings of Alistair C. Crombie.- General Index.