Abstract

The periodical History of Science opened auspiciously in 1962 with an article by L. Pearce Williams on ‘The physical sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century: problems and sources’. He criticized the nearly exclusive reliance on printed sources then quite common in studies of Victorian science, concluded that much remained to be discovered and closed his paper with these words: What papers exist in private hands can only be guessed. I know of a trunk in an attic containing unpublished letters from Darwin, Huxley, Kolbe, Pasteur and a host of others. They are, unfortunately, not available to the scholar and there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of such boxes scattered through America and Europe. As they are discovered, catalogued and made available to scholars, the shape of nineteenth-century science will gradually lose its blurred outlines and the origins of modern science will become clear