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his work is studded with useful insights and facts. Very few readers will fail to benefit from the great range of topics and issues he addresses. The book's title, though, is more ambitious than its contents. This is not a complete historical survey of interac- tions between people and meteorites-in- deed, such a survey would require a book much longer than this. Nor is it a history of meteoritics as a scientific discipline; that will require still another book. Burke has instead focused on major trends and con- troversies and on the arguments of scien- tists involved in them. Valuable tables and indexes and splendid color photographs en- hance the value of the text.

The book's great strength is its presenta- tion, in great detail and with considerable sophistication, of the ebb and flow of hy- potheses about meteorites and their origins. Not only does the author discuss the scien- tific issues in depth, but these are placed in their proper historical context regarding the various branches of knowledge bearing on them. Meteoritics is an interdisciplinary field of study, and Burke goes nimbly back and forth between physics, chemistry, as- tronomy, and geology in examining the issues. Not many people could have brought the same talents to this work. In more than one instance, I found questions my own earlier work had raised answered by Burke's research. I was delighted to see the fullest account yet offered of Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on the subject.

In spite of the book's overall thorough- ness, one cannot always agree with the au- thor's assertions. He argues that the social status and education of the witnesses was not a major factor in early (eighteenth-cen- tury) rejections of meteorite reports. He feels instead that the only factor was scien- tific implausibility. I cannot quite credit that Burke really believes this. For in- stance, he cites specific cases (e.g., on p. 45) when lack of education was used as a reason for rejection. In the Barbotan fall of 1790, some three hundred witnesses were ridiculed in print for reporting a veritable deluge of stones upon their heads. Does Burke really believe this reaction would have taken place if members of the Acade- mie des Sciences had been present? Or if they had bothered to investigate? When he states that "it was not until the late nine- teenth century that scholars realized that myths and folk beliefs about meteors and meteorites existed ... among contempo-

rary primitive and civilized peoples" (p. 213), he obviously cannot include Erik Pontoppidan's discussion in The Natural History of Norway (1755), or Antoine de Jussieu's in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences for 1723. One of the reasons, however, for scientists' rejection of mete- orite reports in the eighteenth century was their awareness of just such superstitious beliefs and "folk wisdom."

I speaking of books like this, the word "definitive" comes to mind. That Cosmic Debris will not be superseded for many years is evident. What struck me, however, is how much more there is to do in this area, a fertile field that can yet yield some interesting fruit.

RON WESTRUM

Stephen Jay Gould. Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discov- ery of Geological Time. (The Jerusalem- Harvard Lectures.) xiii + 222 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1987. $17.50.

Based on a series of lectures at Hebrew University in 1985, this essay on the histor- ical and conceptual foundations of geologi- cal time will interest scholars as well as general readers. Stephen Jay Gould evi- dently intends to speak primarily to those informed through the standard histories in geology textbooks-those for whom Thomas Burnet's open religiosity and theorizing were marks of an obstructor to progress in geological thought, for whom James Hutton was the archetypal inductive field investigator and Charles Lyell the un- ambiguously uniformitarian vanquisher of catastrophism. Gould's skilled destruction of this "cardboard history," a debunking he disarmingly admits has already been ac- complished by historical specialists whose work has not yet percolated into the con- sciousness of most geologists and students, is done with such panache and clarity that it is profitable reading for all who wish to gain a better understanding of geology's roots.

The focus is upon the concepts of irre- versible change and recurrence in time, and upon the tensions between these ideas and their complementarity. Gould's arguments unfold through discussion of three famous works by Burnet, Hutton, and Lyell. In each case he maintains that the text's cen- tral meaning is apprehended only when in-

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 78: 4: 294 (1987) 609

terpreted through the twin themes of arrows and cycles of time. At the least he persuades one that there is merit in such a claim. Burnet emerges convincingly as fashioning a scientific account of the earth reliant about equally upon linear and cyclic time conceptions, and as sharing a great deal more intellectually with his near-con- temporary Nicolaus Steno than is imagin- able in a historical tradition that sets up an opposition between the misguided specula- tor Burnet and the observationally saga- cious Steno. Hutton is revealed as an ad- herent of final causes whose most crucial geological evidence was gathered to sup- port preconceived theory, and as so reso- lute a believer in explanation through im- manent laws that his geology excludes history. Lyell is shown as following a clever strategy to conflate distinct mean- ings of his doctrine of uniformity and to brand his progressionist opponents as un- scientific in his losing quest to support a nondirectional vision of geological history.

It is true that historians of geology have lately offered many of these same percep- tions (in publications only partly listed in Gould's bibliography), just as it is true that most authors of geology-textbook history have displayed a notable imperviousness to this new historical knowledge. Followers of Gould's oeuvre will not be surprised, how- ever, to find his rendering of these lessons highly stimulating and insightful, even if some of the same points and arguments have already appeared in his earlier essays. Most of the features characteristic of Gould's artful interpretation of science to a broad public are here-his penchant for au- tobiography, for instance, and his interest in linking historical matters with contempo- rary scientific issues. Gould's historical writings fit into a special genre, set apart from work customarily done by historical scholars-highly personal and freewheel- ing, more selective of what questions to ad- dress and therefore often less complete- and this book exemplifies his mastery of that particular genre.

The successes of Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle are not all equal. It elevates our awareness of the metaphorical nature of historical and immanent time concepts and of the importance of gauging the roles assigned to these metaphors by major thinkers from Burnet to Lyell. But the book achieves its purpose a bit less thor- oughly, it seems to me, in supporting the

profound importance it claims for the idea of "deep time" to which the arrow-and- cycle dichotomy is historically linked. We do not get as clear an explanation as we might wish of why a commitment to deep time emerged only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not a good deal ear- lier.

Nonetheless, these lectures are rich with interesting and useful ideas. No one will fail to learn from them. And it is fortunate that so gifted and visible a scientific thinker as Gould shares in and understands so well the outlook and work of contemporary his- torians of geology.

KENNETH L. TAYLOR

Josef Konvitz. Cartography in France, 1660-1848: Science, Engineering, and State- craft. Foreword by Emmanuel Le Roy La- durie. xx + 194 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. $39.95.

Josef Konvitz has written a history of policy about mapmaking rather than a his- tory of the making of maps. Judgments about how satisfactory a book this is will turn on the admissibility of the limits that he draws around his subject. He is candid about feeling more at home with adminis- trative and institutional than with technical matters and expresses the hope that others may come forward to deepen historical un- derstanding of the latter aspects. Accord- ingly, we have nothing, or very little, about developments in theory, fieldwork, design, or publication. There is an immediacy about maps, however. They are made to be seen and handled, and to my taste a delib- erately external approach to the history of mapmaking is less congenial than it might be if addressed to other, perhaps more ab- stract, disciplines.

Still, half the story is better than none. Konvitz's short book is the distillation of an enormous effort of research, principally in the Departement des Cartes et Plans in the Bibliotheque Nationale, but also in other repositories. In the middle of the sev- enteenth century French cartography was undistinguished by comparison with Dutch or British work. At the end of the eigh- teenth century its quality was unrivaled. How to explain its success is Konvitz's problem. In the main, though he does not say this, the improvement is one instance among many of the gathering vitality of

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