1868 in science

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The year 1868 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• January 30 – Publication of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (by John Murray in London), including his theory of heredity, which he calls pangenesis.
• Jules-Emile Planchon and colleagues propose Phylloxera as the cause of the Great French Wine Blight.
• Roland Trimen reads a paper to the Linnaean Society explaining Batesian mimicry in African butterflies.
• T. H. Huxley discovers what he thinks is primordial matter and names it Bathybius haeckelii. He admits his mistake in 1871.
• The Granny Smith apple cultivar originates in Eastwood, New South Wales, Australia, from a chance seedling propagated by Maria Ann Smith (née Sherwood, 1799–1870).

Chemistry

• August 18 – The element later named as helium is first detected in the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere by French astronomer Jules Janssen during a total eclipse in Guntur, India, but assumed to be sodium.
• October 20 – English astronomer Norman Lockyer observes and names the D₃ Fraunhofer line in the solar spectrum and concludes that it is caused by a hitherto unidentified element which he later names helium.
• Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron patents methods of color photography.

Medicine

• Jean-Martin Charcot describes and names multiple sclerosis.
• Adolph Kussmaul performs the first esophagogastroduodenoscopy on a living human.

Paleontology

• March – French geologist Louis Lartet discovers the first identified skeletons of Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens), at Abri de Crô-Magnon, a rock shelter at Les Eyzies, Dordogne, France.

Technology

• October 28 – American inventor Thomas Edison applies for his first patent, for a form of electronic voting machine.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Charles Wheatstone
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Carl Friedrich Naumann

Births

• January 31 – Theodore William Richards (died 1928), chemist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• February 7 – Aleen Cust (died 1937), veterinary surgeon.
• March 15 – Grace Chisholm Young (died 1944), mathematician.
• March 22 – Robert Millikan (died 1953), physicist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics.
• April 4 – Philippa Fawcett (died 1948), mathematician.
• April 8 – Herbert Jennings (died 1947), zoologist.
• April 14 – Annie Russell (died 1947), astronomer.
• May 2 – Robert W. Wood (died 1955), optical physicist.
• June 6 – Robert Falcon Scott (died 1912), explorer.
• June 14 – Karl Landsteiner (died 1943), physiologist.
• July 4 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt (died 1921), astronomer.
• October 23 – Frederick W. Lanchester (died 1946), automotive engineer.
• November 8 – Felix Hausdorff (died 1942), mathematician.
• December 9 – Fritz Haber (died 1934), chemist.
• J. B. Christopherson (died 1955), physician.

Deaths

• February 11 – Léon Foucault (born 1819), physicist.
• February 24 – John Herapath (born 1790), physicist.
• May 22 – Julius Plücker (born 1801), mathematician and physicist.
• June 25 – Alexander Mitchell (born 1780), engineer and inventor of the screw-pile lighthouse.
• September 26 – August Ferdinand Möbius (born 1790), mathematician.
• December 25 – Linus Yale, Jr. (born 1821), inventor.
• December 31 – James David Forbes (died 1809), physicist, glaciologist and seismologist.