Making instruments count

This collection of essays, bringing together many of the established curators and historians in the field of scientific instruments and ranging widely over their interests, represents a branch of the history of science whose activity, output and significance within the discipline have blossomed in recent years. It is no longer possible to fence off a grand conceptual succession and represent this as the only essence of scientific development. Practices - in discovery, experiment, application and teaching - are integral parts of what science does and are therefore all part of what it is, and instruments were central to each of these varieties of scientific practice. The instrument historian comes in a number of guises - the scholar, the collector, the curator, the dealer - and the discipline is practised in a variety of settings.^ The university has very different priorities from the salesroom, the museum from the antiques fair, but the challenge of instrument history is to integrate connoisseurship, technical insight and historical sensitivity, while not neglecting the trade institutions and practices of the makers and remaining familiar with instrument populations in both the capt