There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

Much has been made of Plato's influence of medieval minds, yet as Raymond Klibansky reminds us, much remains to be learned. The twelfth-century Platonist writings are notably various: Brian Stock and Winthrop Weatherbee have examined the effect of Platonic tradition on twelfth-century poetry and Tullio Gregory and Richard Lemay have added to our understanding of its effect on philosophical and theoretical thought in this period. The rich accretions of Hermetic and astrological material have been studied along with the older Plotinian interpretations and the whole complicated orchestration of these various themes has received minute attention. Moreover, in this diversity of Platonic writings, a strongly imaginative quality is often present. Indeed, as Peter Dronke says,

They are achievements not only of the rational intellect but of the active imagination. Their cosmological insights are nourished by imaginative springs as much as by the disciplined sources of abstract thinking. Theirs is a realm where sacred visions and profane myth can combine with analytic thought, poetic fantasy with physical and metaphysical speculation. In terms of scholarship it is a realm which, because it is at the borders of several genres, is still in many ways a neglected one.

The career of Thomas Beddoes was moulded by British responses to the French Revolution. Beddoes, until appalled by the events of the Terror, saw France as the model for mankind. The government of England took the very different view that democracy was closely allied with jacobinism and sedition. The Home Office was the agency most immediately engaged in opposing sedition, and any criticism of the King, or of the constitution in church and state, was scrutinized as being potentially seditious. In 1793, England and France went to war, and the following years saw treason trials and gagging bills, profoundly disturbing even to the more conservative among the friends of peace and liberty in England, Beddoes among them.

Since its foundation in 1799, the Royal Institution of Great Britain has attracted talent and witnessed memorable events in science. The records of many of these events, as well as of the day to day institutional happenings have been preserved. The archives, manuscripts comprising note books, papers and correspondence, as well as the pictorial records, the scientific apparatus and the personal relics of the people who have worked and lived here together with an extensive library all provide a valuable resource for the historian of science.

Samuel Lytler Metcalfe (1798–1856) was an American chemist and physician who wrote a voluminous work, Caloric Its Mechanical Chemical and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature (2 vols., London, 1843); attempting to account for all natural phenomena in terms of caloric. The book came out at the time when the concept of caloric was being gradually discarded and the law of conservation of energy was about to appear. Metcalfe was convinced that caloric would be the key to unlock the secrets of nature; in order to develop the practical implications of his views he made research trips twice to England (1831 and 1835–45), and there he completed Caloric.