Scientific Centenaries in 1938

Abstract

The scientific centenaries which occur this year are of wide and varied interest. They include the tercentenary of the printing at Amsterdam of Galileo's great work, the “Dialogues of the Two Sciences of Mechanics and Motion”, and of the birth of the Scottish mathematician James Gregory ; the bicentenary of the death of Boer-haave, the famous Dutch physician and chemist, and the bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Herschel ; and the centenaries of the death of Dulong, the French chemist and physicist, and of Nathaniel Bowditch, the American mathematician and astronomer, and also the centenaries of the birth of Sir William Perkin, Ernest Solvay, Cleveland Abbe, George James Symons, Retro Tacchini and of Count Zeppelin. The year 1738 also saw the publication of DanielBernoulli's “Hydrodynamics”, while the year 1838 witnessed, first the inauguration of trans-Atlantic steam navigation, and secondly, the opening of the whole of the railway line from London to Birmingham, constructed by Robert Stephenson.