rences, and finally at the proposition that all of these factors might themselves be reflective of broad differences in cultural tradition.
Let us first consider the areas of science to which the leading scientists of the two countries addressed themselves. We will immediate find that they align with some consistancy with the preferences argued above. Chemistry and astronomy, for example, as they stood in the nineteenth century, lent themselves to mathematical treatment, and it should not surprise us that the French were prominent in these disciplines. In chemistry, in particular, where they had the work and thought of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to build upon, the French were dominant in the first half of the century; in spite of the work of Sir Humphrey Davy, chemistry was in the 1830s "still a French science" (Knight, 1986, p. 21). It remained so, in substantial measure, until the dramatic rise of German chemistry late in the century. Following Lavoisier's overthrow of the older chemical tradition (Lavoisier, 1790), and until the discovery of subatomic physics at the turn of the twentieth century, the central problem of chemistry was combinatorial; the determination of which elements could combine with which others, and in what proportions. This was a problem that lent itself to analysis of a mathematical character.
Likewise, nineteenth-century astronomy was largely concerned with the precise determination of the orbital characteristics of the planets, and with the immensely complex problem of determining their gravitational interactions (the so-called three-body problem). The single greatest triumph of nineteenth-century astronomy was the determination of the existence and position of Neptune through its gravitational influence upon other planets. As it happened, an Englishman, John Couch Adams, shared with the Frenchman Leverrier the honor of having made this calculation. But the French felt that Leverrier deserved...