Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1998

8Instruments of Science: AnHistorical Encyclopediaedited by Robert Bud and Deborah JeanWarnerGarland: 1998. Pp. 709. £100, $187.50

Arthur Middleton

When I was asked to review this book, Iaccepted happily enough. Later, I had mis-givings: a comprehensive encyclopedia ofscientific instruments? Most encyclopedias,unless they are the size and scope of the Ency-clopaedia Britannica, miss out a good deal.My first queries were: “does it start from thefirst instruments that were used by man?”,and then “is it up to date, including theinstruments used in early experiments intonuclear physics?” I am relieved to report thatit does all this, and more. Up-to-date entriesinclude the American rail track loading vehi-cle of 1990, the ion-sensitive microelectrodefrom the 1970s, and the laser and maser.

The idea for this book germinated fiveyears ago, leading to a collaboration betweenthe Science Museum, London, and theSmithsonian Institution, Washington DC.The 223 contributors who wrote the 327entries volunteered their time and expertise,or were otherwise pushed, cajoled, bullied,entreated or pleaded to contribute, and sothey did, but not for money, receiving a freecopy of the encyclopedia instead. The entriesin many cases are subdivided to take intoaccount the development of a particularinstrument over decades, such as thechronoscope, or over centuries, such as thetelescope, from the earliest example of 1608to the modern radio- and X-ray telescopes.

The illustrations are mostly pho-tographs, with a scattering of prints fromearly books (from the fifteenth to the eigh-teenth century) or makers’ catalogues fromthe early nineteenth century onwards. Otherillustrations are schematic. Where the pho-tograph of a larger instrument includes theoperator standing beside it, some scowling,as in the old days of photography (likeMichel Ter-Pogossian with an early positronemission tomography scanner), or grinningbroadly (like John Mallard with his proto-type magnetic resonance imaging device),there is a good idea of size and scale. But Iwish that the other photographs, particu-larly those of laboratory instruments,included their measurements in the caption.Jesse Ramsden’s three-foot geodetic theodo-lite is a large and splendid item, but WilliamAbney’s level would sit comfortably in thepalm of the hand: one is left to guess.

The encyclopedia’s advisory committeeof nine includes such impressive names asRobert Anderson of the British Museum,Paolo Brenni, recently elected vice-chairman

of the Scientific Instruments Commission ofthe International Union of the History andPhilosophy of Science, and Gerard Turner,former president of the same and presidentof the Scientific Instrument Society. All butthree of the committee also contributed.

Of the 217 others, I was particularlypleased to see that Diana Crawforth-Hitchens contributed a piece about the gen-eral balance, as she has become an authorityon scales and balances since the untimelydeath of her husband a few years ago. JimBennett, of the Museum of the History ofScience at the University of Oxford, writesclearly on early surveying and navigationinstruments, subjects covered in his bookThe Divided Circle (now, alas, out of print).David King of Frankfurt reveals the workingsof the planispheric astrolabe in an under-standable manner, although the mariner’sversion is illustrated by a seventeenth-centuryprint; a photograph of an original wouldhave been better. There are only 80 authenti-cated examples in the world, but some ofthem, despite immersion in the sea for hun-dreds of years, still have remarkably freshdivisions and numbering. They survived sowell because they were wrapped in cloth andkept in wooden chests, before being broughtup from the deep along with the treasure.Others were dropped overboard, probablyby the numb, cold hands of a profane sea-man, and much later a scoured fragmentwould turn up in a fisherman’s net.

This book will be of greatest value to stu-dents of the history of science. How many

young people know the difference betweenthe mariner’s astrolabe and the planispheric(or Persian) type, what they look like andhow they work; can tell at a glance if a tele-scope is a reflector or a refractor; or why thesextant and the octant are so called, whenthey both do the same job in the same man-ner? Now they might find out.

Turning to the first entry, the abacus, Iwas encouraged to find a lucid explanation ofthe differences between the Western andEastern styles of the instrument, somethingdifficult to find elsewhere. The book alsoexplains that the royal accounts of KingHenry II of England (1154–89) were calcu-lated over a table called a chessboard, hencethe expression ‘the exchequer’.

Comparing the numbers of instrumentsto the time frame in which they were invent-ed, it is not surprising that the nineteenthand twentieth centuries have most, 115 each.This then declines rapidly as we go back intime, to 37 in the eighteenth century, 30 inthe seventeenth century and 31 before that.The entries are between 800 and 1,800words, hence the need for 700 pages.

The short bibliography at the end of eachsubject is useful, and in many cases one of thereference works cited was written by the con-tributor, such as that about the patch-clampamplifier by Erwin Neher, the sphygmo-manometer (which measures arterial bloodpressure) by Hughes Evans, or the equatori-um (a Renaissance calculator that providesangular coordinates to determine the truelongitude of a planet) by Mercè Comes. The

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History under the microscopebook reviews

Instrumental to science history: a planisphericastrolabe from 1666 (above) and a Powell andLealand achromatic telescope from 1846 (right).

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equatorium is a rare and complex instru-ment, and is not easy for non-astronomers tounderstand. The example illustrated, one ofonly a handful known, is in the collection ofthe National Museums and Galleries atMerseyside, in the United Kingdom. Acropped version is used as the colour illustra-tion on the front cover, but very few readerswould recognize it. A better, and perhapsmore symbolic, choice might have been thePowell and Lealand microscope of 1846. Just60 years later, Charles Rolls and Henry Roycestarted making cars, in the same limitedquantity but to the same exacting standards.

One of my sons is presently reading for hisMSc. I considered giving him my review copyof this encyclopedia but, on second thoughts,I shall make good use of it myself.Arthur Middleton, a dealer in the history ofscience, is at 12 New Row, Covent Garden, London WC2N 4LF, UK.

Darwin’s fixedcourseEvolution: Society, Science and theUniverseedited by A. C. FabianCambridge University Press: 1998. Pp. 179.£16.95, $22.95

Mark Pagel

The irony of the modern tendency to use theword ‘evolution’ as synonymous with naturalselection is that, like the traits of manyspecies, it may reveal something of its ances-try. In Darwin’s time, ‘evolve’ meant tounfold, roll out or unfurl, suggesting a fixedcourse. He anxiously wished to avoid thismeaning for his new-found ‘natural selec-tion’, and so it may not be surprising that heused ‘evolve’ only once in the first edition ofThe Origin of Species, and even then he wait-ed until the very end, to the last word of thebook. And yet, some of the products of nat-ural selection are so exquisite as to suggestsomething preordained, and ‘evolve’ in itsold denotative sense finds its way back intoour discourse.

Meanings change, however. The contem-porary scientific concept of evolution as sim-ply ‘to change over time’ is ever more widelyapplied, and not just to refer to living things.A. C. Fabian’s delightful new edited volumeis a case in point. Fabian invited eight well-known “communicators from separate dis-ciplines” to discuss evolution in the success-ful Darwin College lecture series at the Uni-versity of Cambridge. The result is an eclecticcollection that can fail to interest only themodern philistine.

The possibility that forms of naturalselection lurk as ‘invisible hands’ in areaswell removed from biology does not alwayssettle easily in the mind of the essayist. In her

chapter, Gillian Beer allows that readers andnovels have evolved. She is less willing tocountenance the view that works outside theliterary canon, although less ‘fit’, are some-how less worth reading. The architectRichard Rogers argues passionately thatLondon has been in steady decline since themid-1980s when the government removedits central planning authority. Rogers andBeer are making a point well known to biolo-gists: that which emerges from the unsenti-mental struggle for survival is the fittest, butnot necessarily the most desirable.

Biologists wishing to understand humancivilization from a darwinian perspectiveconfront a dilemma, avers Tim Ingold. Allhuman cultural evolution has taken placeagainst the same biological background: FredFlintstone, had he been born later, might havebeen Shakespeare or Einstein. This, Ingoldsays, forces biologists to adopt a ‘progressive’view of history as the “unfolding of pre-evolved potentials”, with ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers at the bottom and Western scien-tists at the top: a “fundamentally teleologicalview!” Ingold exclaims triumphantly.

But cultural evolution is not a one-waystreet: cultures adopt more ‘primitive’ sub-sistence practices when it is advantageous todo so and, as Jared Diamond’s informativechapter summarizes, they lose as well asacquire technologies. He records how Tas-manian islanders lost the ability to fish andeven to start fires following their geographi-cal separation from mainland Australians.

Ingold’s position shows how difficult it canbe to translate the arguments and assump-tions of one field to another.

Still, evolutionary processes may unfoldin more subtle ways than is realized. Theastronomer Martin Rees reluctantly pon-ders whether our Universe could have beenmuch different from what we see, given thelaws of physics that emerged with the BigBang. A similar question worries biologists:are the forms we see now (such as kangaroos,toadstools, fruitflies and sequoias) mereaccidents, or if we were to re-run evolutionwould similar (if not the same) kinds oforganisms emerge? Intriguingly, evidence ispointing towards the latter view, confound-ing many a sceptic. And what of cities andeven novels? The future may not be pre-ordained but its broad outlines might be.

The long march of evolution nowincludes spin-offs into other fields; E. O.Wilson sees this as a process of ‘conciliance’.This was not lost on Fabian, who, havingbrought his speakers to Cambridge, pro-duced this fine volume. With contributorsranging from those discussed here to Free-man Dyson, Lewis Wolpert and Stephen JayGould, Fabian’s book reaffirms my view thatthe best researchers and scientists oftenmake the best science writers: no exaggerat-ed claims, no mysterious theories of every-thing, no yin and yang. Just a joy to read.Mark Pagel is in the Department of Zoology,University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OxfordOX1 3PS, UK.

book reviews

752 NATURE | VOL 393 | 25 JUNE 1998

The arrangement of featuresin the human face largelyreflects sensory, dietary andlinguistic considerations, soall faces look more or less thesame. This means that minorvariations can effectivelyconvey social signals andinformation about identity.This is why natural facialdisfigurements have such aprofound effect on people’slives. It also explains thedisturbing effect of artisticviolations of the face, such asthis striking painting, Le Viol(The Rape) by René Magritte.Or so argue Vicki Bruce andAndy Young in In the Eye ofthe Beholder: The Science ofFace Perception (OxfordUniversity Press, £25). Theybring together science and art to explain the importance of the face, howwe extract the information it contains, and reveal what it all means.

Face value