Wilkins Lecture
# Wilkins Lecture

The Wilkins Lecture was a lecture organised by the Royal Society of London on the subject of the history of science and named after John Wilkins, the first Secretary of the Society. The last Wilkins lecture was delivered in 2003, after which it was merged with the Bernal Lecture and the Medawar Lecture to form the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture.

## List of recipients

| Year | Name | Lecture | Notes |
| - | - | - | - |
| 1948 | John David Griffith Davies | John Wilkins and the Royal Society. | — |
| 1949 | Edward Neville da Costa Andrade | Robert Hooke. | — |
| 1950 | Francis Joseph Cole | The history of micro-dissection. | — |
| 1952 | Harold Brewer Hartley | Sir Humphry Davy, Bt, P.R.S. | — |
| 1955 | Basil Schonland | Benjamin Franklin, natural philosopher. | — |
| 1958 | Joseph Needham | The missing link in horological history: a Chinese contribution. | — |
| 1961 | Gavin Rylands de Beer | The origins of Darwins ideas on evolution and natural selection. | — |
| 1964 | Giorgio de Santillana | Galileo today. | — |
| 1967 | Geoffrey Langdon Keynes | Bacon, Harvey, and the originators of the Royal Society. | — |
| 1970 | Reginald Victor Jones | The plain story of James Watt. | — |
| 1973 | Alfred Rupert Hall | Newton and his editors. | — |
| 1976 | Margaret Gowing | Science, technology and education: England in 1870. | — |
| 1979 | Gweneth Whitteridge | On the local movement of animals. | — |
| 1982 | Sydney Smith | One hundred years after Charles Darwin. | — |
| 1985 | William Thomas Stearn | John Wilkins, John Ray and Carl Linnaeus. | — |
| 1988 | David S. Landes | Brain and hand in the development of technology of time-measurement. | — |
| 1991 | Stephen Finney Mason | Bishop John Wilkins FRS. | — |
| 1994 | Allan Chapman | Edmond Halley as a historian of science. | — |
| 1997 | Desmond George King-Hele | Erasmus Darwin, the Lunatiks and evolution. | — |
| 2000 | Roy Porter | Reflections on scientific and medical futurology since the time of John Wilkins. | — |
| 2003 | Lisa Jardine | Dr Wilkins's boy wonders. | — |
