Selected BibliographyAuthor(s): Peter J. WestwickReviewed work(s):Source: Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1997), pp. 197-207Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27757791 .Accessed: 12/12/2011 19:04

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PETER J. WESTWICK

Selected bibliography

Cao, Tian Yu. Conceptual developments of 20th century field theories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xx, 433 pp.

Aside from its first and last chapters, Cao's Conceptual developments covers much the same territory as Andrew Pickering's Constructing quarks (1984). Both march forward from the dawn of quantum field theory, through its many challenges in the early 1960s, to its eventual crowning victories with the stan dard model and quantum chromodynamics. Neither author is likely to enjoy the

comparison: whereas Pickering directs his study towards demonstrating a Kuh nian incommensurability between particle physics before and after the "gauge revolution," Cao takes as his explicit aim the recovery of scientific realism and scientific rationality.

Cao dedicates nearly one third of his book to a close study of the conceptual underpinnings of general relativity (a topic that Pickering does not treat), does not mention a single experiment, and proceeds with minimal attention to histori cal scholarship to minute dissections of physical concepts. Particularly impres sive is his treatment of the several distinct conceptual strands improperly strewn

together under the title "the quantization of fields." Cao also links the geometr ical program of general relativity (with respect to external, spacetime sym

metries) with later, seemingly independent developments in gauge field theories (a geometrization with respect to internal symmetries). Later chapters tackle

changing views of renormalization and what these views portend for the current debates over effective field theories versus theories of everything.

The book seems to be built around the tacit premise that there exists one canon of important physics papers, each with its own correct interpretation; and if Fermi, or Bethe, or Weisskopf missed this true interpretation in their own

day, Cao stands poised now to right us in our quest. David Kaiser

Clercq, Peter de. At the sign of the oriental lamp: The Musschenbroek

workshop in Leiden, 1660-1750. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1997. 328 pp.: illus.

The recent historiography of scientific instruments is characterized by great resourcefulness in exploiting archives and museums and an equally great reti

cence to generalize findings. The volume under review, a doctoral thesis by a member of the Boerhaave Museum in Leyden, is a fine example of the genre. De Clercq has brought to fight much scattered information about the products

HSPS, 28:1 (1997)

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and clientele of the Musschenbroek workshop and more systematic data about its manufacture of airpumps, the only thing it made that it consistently signed. (The oriental lamp in the title of de Clercq's book was not a scientific instru

ment but the leading product of the brass foundry from which the workshop developed.)

De Clercq concerns himself with the standard questions in his specialty: the size of the workshop; its wares, production, and clients; and the contribution of its proprietors to its designs. De Clercq's answers refine the accepted picture. He confirms that the workshop had few if any regular staff apart from the fam

ily; that it offered for sale, but did not necessarily make, a great variety of instruments, particularly physical ones; that the variety increased rapidly, from 90 to 240 types, between 1714 and 1730; that the increase owed much to the collaboration between Jan van Musschenbroek and the Leyden professor W.J. 'sGravesande; that the workshop's market was largely domestic, the universities of Leyden and Utrecht, where Jan's brother Petrus taught, being especially good clients; and that, internationally, its most important patron was Pope Benedict XIV, who commissioned from it a set of physical apparatus for the Accademia delle Scienze in Bologna.

With much effort, de Clercq has identified 43 airpumps probably made by the Musschenbroeks. On the strength of this figure and analogical evidence, he has permitted himself the guess that, on average, the workshop made one or two

airpumps a year. From the annual output and estimates of the time required to

put together a pump, informed guesses about manpower and work practices might be made. May de Clercq allow himself to make them!

J.L. Heilbron

Dick, Steven J. The biological universe: The twentieth century extraterrestrial

life debate and the limits of science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi, 578 pp.: illus.

Building on the mature literature on the history of thought on the plurality of worlds, Steven J. Dick offers a comprehensive history of the issues raised by debates over extraterrestrial life from the middle decades of the nineteenth cen

tury to the present. He stresses the theory of biological evolution and the prac tice of stellar spectroscopy as the basic ingredients of the twentieth-century world-view that Dick terms "biophysical cosmology." This view "made a claim about the large-scale nature of the universe" at the same time that it

implied that life was a basic property of it. Dick arranges his material around traditional themes like the rise of the

planetary sciences, the exploration of the solar system, and the origin of life debate, as well as more imaginative ones that explore representations of aliens in fiction and UFO controversies in popular culture. Two very original chapters describe the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and exobiology, a

discipline that the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson once characterized "as a science looking for a subject." Another important chapter discusses reli

gious, philosophical, and cultural contexts of the extraterrestrial life debate. The

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book should convince a wide range of readers that the human preoccupation with extraterrestrial life deserves even more study.

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

Edmondson, Frank K.. AURA and its U.S. National Observatories. Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xviii, 367 p.: illus..

Frank Edmondson, an astronomer at Indiana University, has collected an

immense amount of information, both in documents and through interviews, about the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), its Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and its Cerro Tololo Inter-American

Observatory in Chile. Furthermore, when official notes of meetings have been "sanitized," Edmondson can call upon his personal knowledge to supplement them. He was the National Science Foundation's program director for astron

omy in 1956, when the decision was made to create a corporation of universi ties to construct and operate a national observatory, and he was a director of

AURA, the resultant corporation, from its beginning in 1957 until 1983, includ

ing a stint as president from 1962 to 1965. The reporting is clear, accurate, and detailed, with ample documentation,

though personnel matters occasionally find Edmondson torn between full disclo sure and discretion. He tells us which candidate was chosen but does not name the runners-up; he tells us who was fired but not, in one instance, why. As a cautious scientist, Edmondson chooses not to speculate?as a historian would

feel compelled to do?about underlying causes, but there is much worthy of

speculation here. Before AURA, American observatories were private enter

prises; does AURA mark a watershed in support for science? Edmondson focuses on the administrative story; were there also changes in science, both in its intellectual content and in its social practice, as a result of AURA or that affected it? And how important was the general political background, including Sputnik, in the creation of and generous support for AURA in its early years? Edmondson does mention Sputnik and he has a chapter on the role of Robert McMath, an advisor to the NSF whose clout in Washington may have been even more influential than Sputnik in the creation of a national astronomical

observatory. Edmondson has done well what he set out to do and his legacy of information and insight will assist less prudent historians in their speculations. Norriss S. Hetherington

Graham, Loren. The ghost of the executed engineer: Technology and the fall of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. xiv, 128

pp.: illus.

After a thirty-year quest to clarify the life story of Peter Palchinsky (1875-1930), Loren Graham has written a poignant, economical introduction to the role of technology and the engineer in the former Soviet Union.

Reared amid the library of his mother's impecunious noble family,

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Palchinsky graduated from the Petersburg Mining Academy, one of tsarist Russia's elite technical training grounds, and in 1901-1902 was commissioned to study labor conditions in the Donetsk coal basin. Discovering residential bar racks with sixty-eight miners living in a single room, he concluded that Russia needed not just technical innovation but also social transformation. Drawn to

the non-violent anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, and then to moderate socialism,

Palchinsky suffered half a dozen arrests under the autocracy, his employer, and was finally exiled to Siberia, whence he escaped to Europe in 1908. In 1913, on the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, he received a pardon and returned to

Russia, only to be arrested in 1917 by the Bolsheviks. Released the next year, Palchinsky became a professor at the Mining Institute, where he championed a "humanitarian engineering'' according priority to social needs. Again arrested in 1928 as part of the Soviet regime's attempts to mobilize support for industri alization by inciting class war and anti-intellectualism, Palchinsky was named the lead conspirator in the fabricated Industrial Party trial and shot in 1930.

Having related Palchinsky's life with empathy, Graham then recounts three of the USSR's colossal developmental projects of the 1930s before jumping to the Brezhnev period for a quick run through the construction of the Baikal Amur railroad in Siberia, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and the old mines of the Donetsk basin, where, three-quarters of a century after Palchinsky's gut

wrenching report on working and living conditions, little seemed to have

changed. Graham uses Palchinsky's fate to illustrate why, in the author's words, the USSR "failed to become a modem industrialized country." He con siders the USSR to have been a technocracy because the elite overwhelmingly possessed a technical education, but this education, he argues, was excessively specialized, producing engineers ignorant of social issues yet steeped in wooden

Marxism-Leninism?characterized as a deeply flawed, non-humanist techno

cracy of the kind that Palchinsky opposed. As Graham admits, however, his hero also advocated some form of "socialist" industrialization with a planned economy and a prominent role for technocrats. Graham deems Palchinsky's more humanitarian vision to have fallen victim not to its own contradictions, much less to interwar geopolitics, but to Stalin's wrongheaded policies.

In lamenting the USSR's failure to achieve the democratic, socially progres sive, efficient modernity envisioned by Palchinsky, Graham neglects to assess the USSR's competition with western Europe and America. Was it not the effort to "catch and overtake" the most advanced and powerful countries of the world that helped determine the USSR's trajectory and eventually brought it down? Conducting research in a land possessing tens of thousands of sophisti cated nuclear missiles, Loren Graham, America's leading scholar of science in the Soviet Union, had to spin the microfilm through the reader with his finger and turn off the machine every fifteen minutes to avoid igniting the newly declassified material.

Stephen Kotkin

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Gusterson, Hugh. Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xviii, 351 pp.: illus.

With the end of the Cold War the survival of American scientific institutions formed to promote national security has come into question. The national

laboratory at Livermore, established in 1952 as an offshoot of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, has struggled since its inception to justify its existence as the second, and perhaps redundant, weapons lab. The

history of Livermore is hard to learn; important documents from its early history seem not to have survived and others remain classified. Hugh Gusterson skirts these problems via the anthropological route and relies in this study on field work at the lab and interviews with lab employees to arrive at a picture of con

temporary lab culture.

Gusterson positions his work as a response against both "realist" political scientists, who describe international relations as anarchic and hence see nuclear

weapons as a reasonable solution for national security, and the psychological

critique of Robert Jay Lifton and others, who see nuclear weapons as a patho logical response and their designers as in a state of denial. He attempts instead the "deconstruction of ideology" at the level of the laboratory; his perspective is anthropological, with a lingo of shamans, rituals, and taboos, and postmodern, with the obligatory section on cyborgs. The strength of the book lies in the

ground-level view of laboratory scientists, including their ethics and religious and domestic lives, and also of the protesters who lined the gates of the lab in the anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s (and whose number at one point included Gusterson). Gusterson notes that scientists and protesters alike were mostly white, well-educated, and middle-class, but that they tended to divide along the lines of Snow's two cultures and also along gender lines. Gusterson attributes the protests at Livermore over weapons research to the opposition of these branches of the middle class, which was exacerbated in the 1980s by the growth of military budgets at the expense of social programs and by the realignment of

gender roles. The book concludes with candid comments on the text by Liver more scientists and protesters.

Peter J. Westwick

Hentschel, Klaus. The Einstein Tower: An intertexture of dynamic construc

tion, relativity theory, and astronomy. Trans. Ann M. Hentschel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xiv, 226 pp.: illus.

The Einstein Tower, erected in Potsdam in 1920-1921, is one of the twentieth

century's most celebrated buildings. Its unusual appearance has prompted its inclusion in histories of art and architecture as an emblem of the wave of exper imental designs that swept across Europe in the first years after World War I.

Until recently, however, the building attracted little attention from historians of science, the scholars best situated to understand its dual function as an observa

tory for, and a monument to, relativity. In Der Einstein-Turm (Berlin: Spec trum, 1992), and in this translation into English of an expanded version of that

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pioneering work, Klaus Hentschel sets forth the story. Although Hentschel includes a chapter on architecture, his most original

contribution is his illumination of the ways in which controversies over rela

tivity played themselves out in the German scientific community during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Hentschel does not seek to chronicle the brilliant discoveries of isolated geniuses and instead details the familiar frustrations of

pleas for funds, petty academic rivalries, and bad weather. He rightly focuses on Erwin Finlay Freundlich, who commissioned the building and worked in it until 1933 when he left Germany for Turkey and then Scotland. Freundlich's contributions to astrophysics never equalled those he almost inadvertently made to architecture when he commissioned his young and unknown friend Erich

Mendelsohn to design the tower. The first astronomer to accept relativity, Freundlich was never able convincingly to demonstrate the redshift through which he hoped to substantiate Einstein's controversial theories. In detailing Freundlich's dead ends, Hentschel resists the temptation to align relativity with Weimar liberalism: although Freundlich's chief opponent was the brother of the

notoriously nationalist General Erich Ludendorff, serious questions about the

quality of Freundlich's research also fueled the frequent criticism of his work.

Kathleen James

Holl, Jack M., with Richard G. Hewlett and Ruth R. Harris. Argonne National Laboratory, 1946-1996. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

xxii, 611 pp.: illus.

Amid the demobilization at the end of World War II, General Leslie R. Groves and the Manhattan Engineer District agreed to sustain the District's laboratories

pending the passage of atomic energy legislation. The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago became Argonne National Laboratory, the first "national lab" formed in this interim period. The Atomic Energy Commission and its successor agencies, including today's Department of Energy, have sus tained the national labs ever since. The labs are reaching their fiftieth birthdays in uncertain times. Many of them are commemorating the occasion with official histories. This history of Argonne joins recent or forthcoming books on AEC labs at Brookhaven, Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Sandia.

Holl traces the history of Argonne from its wartime roots through its

postwar role as the lead lab for reactor development to its subsequent expansion of basic research, exemplified by its entry into high energy physics, and its more recent confusion over its mission and future. The book adopts the

straightforward narrative style familiar to readers of the official AEC histories, the last volume of which Holl and Hewlett co-authored. Holl draws upon his

deep knowledge of the AEC in this work and also upon the vast archival material. He emphasizes throughout the interrelation of politics and science and the political acumen required of Argonne scientists. Argonne's political environment included the University of Chicago (its operator), the midwestern universities, the AEC and its staff, the rest of the executive branch, and

Congress. Argonne's administrators and scientists struggled with the persistent

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problem of how to pursue basic research, and thus satisfy lab staff and univer

sity scientists, while fulfilling AECs programmatic needs; that is, how both to attain autonomy and assure accountability.

Peter J. Westwick

Kipnis, A. Ya., B.E. Yavelov, and J.S. Rowlinson. Van der Waals and molec ular science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ix, 313 pp.: illus., 4 pp. of

plates.

This study, a revised and enlarged version of a Russian biography of 1985 by Kipnis and Yavelov, provides a comprehensive review of the life of Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837-1923), one of the outstanding Dutch physicists of the nineteenth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1910. Van der Waals, the son of a carpenter, taught mathematics at a primary school and entered the University of Leyden at the age of 25. He was appointed a physics teacher at the newly created Hoogere Burgerscholen in Deventer (1864) and The

Hague (1866). He completed and defended his doctoral dissertation, On the

continuity of the gaseous and liquid state, in Leyden at the age of 34. The dissertation proved to be an enormously influential and useful contribution to the thermodynamics of phase transitions. On the basis of this work, he received a call to the University of Amsterdam in 1877, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Van der Waals remained convinced, at least from the writing and publica tion of Continuity, that atoms and molecules exist and that physicists had an

obligation to include their mass and extension in modelling their behavior. He modified the ideal gas law to include the nonideal parameters of atomic and molecular volumes. His conviction that gases, liquids, and solids all followed the same attractive (never repulsive) forces allowed for a successful model of the thermodynamics of phase transitions. Although he has been considered a

physicist, one can also group much of his work with the early works in the new

physical chemistry that emerged in the 1880s. The authors give the mathematical details of van der Waals' work and also

good qualitative descriptions of van der Waals' ideas. They have also included details about his professional and personal life in the Netherlands and excellent

descriptions of the educational system in Holland during the nineteenth century. They have made good use of secondary and primary sources, including archival sources in the Netherlands and Russia, but unfortunately employ a convoluted, cumbersome multiple system for footnotes that is difficult to follow. Aside from this minor shortcoming, they have written an excellent biography of van der Waals that fills a large gap not only in the history of physics and physical chemistry, but also in our understanding of the history of nineteenth century Dutch science.

Peter Ramberg

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Krementsov, Nikolai. Stalinist science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvii, 371 pp.

Though the title indicates a more general study, most of Stalinist science rests on the retelling of the fate of Soviet genetics, particularly after World War II. Two chapters, based primarily on published materials, describe Russian and then Soviet science from 1890 to 1939. The rest examine the case study of

genetics in the 1930s and 1940s, and Lysenko's dominance and destruction of the field by 1948, to reach broad conclusions about the Stalinist science system.

Even after 25 years, David Joravsky's book, The Lysenko affair, remains the best on the topic. Krementsov's work complements Joravsky's by making extensive use of recently accessible materials from Russian archives, some of

which have already been published by other authors in both Russia and the United States. These materials document two of Krementsov's arguments.

First, he shows that a "symbiotic" relationship existed between Party apparatchiki in the Central Committee's science bureau and scientists working in the institutes of the Academy of Science. By this Krementsov means that scientists consciously tried to use the political system to their advantage and that bureaucrats responsible for science knowingly applied the Party's ultimate authority to decide scientific disputes. Second, Krementsov demonstrates the

impact of the cold war on the timing and outcome of the "discussion" in genet ics. He argues that geneticists' attempts from 1944 through 1947 to appeal to "international science" to defend their science against Lysenkoist attacks

backfired by 1948. By the time of the famous meeting of August 1948, interna tional ties were considered evidence of "kowtowing to the west" and "rootless

cosmopolitanism." In this atmosphere, Lysenko's emphasis on "Soviet

Michurinist" science won political favor. Stalinist science contains a number of useful charts and chronologies as well

as a fascinating glossary to help understand the "Stalinist Scientific

'Newspeak'" that dominated both the published materials of the period and the archival documents now being uncovered.

Ethan Pollock

Nowotny, Helga, and Ulrike Felt. After the breakthrough: The emergence of high-temperature superconductivity as a research field. Cambridge: Cam

bridge University Press, 1997. x, 210 pp.

In 1986, in an IBM lab near Zurich, two researchers found a class of materials superconductive at much higher temperatures than ever seen before. This book traces the aftermath of that event, from its initial ignition of imaginations among scientists and lay people to the establishment of national programs of research in the field, and explores the multitude of groups and forces at play in the for

mation of a research field. The overall theme is that research today has become highly complex and interdependent. The authors base the book on interviews and various types of literature and focus on Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. They take a wide view of the history of the field, discussing its

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roots in low-temperature physics and materials science, its emergence among

particular research groups and coalitions, national research politics, and the role

of the popular media. They situate their story aptly and persuasively within social and historical studies of science, although there are more works that they might have cited as fellow travelers.

Jon Guice

Orel, Vitezslav. Gregor Mendel: The first geneticist. Trans. Stephen Finn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii, 363 pp.: illus.

This volume, written by the emeritus head of the Mendel Museum in Brno, is the first full biography of Mendel to incorporate the wealth of relevant new data and insights published over the last thirty years. Non-specialists will be

surprised to learn how much contextual detail has been brought to bear upon the

interpretation of Mendel's breeding experiments with Pisum and other plants. Orel demolishes the myth of Mendel's complete obscurity and isolation during his lifetime. His sketch of the communities of scientists that Mendel joined dur

ing different phases of his career and of the traditions in plant and animal

hybridization experiments in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe are especially instructive. Orel discusses Mendel's activities as a teacher and abbot, paying due attention to the Brno social milieu and the political events that shaped Mendel's career; and his work in meteorology, apiculture, and agriculture, as well as in hybridization.

Orel does not advance a new thesis on the motivation that underlay Mendel's hybridization work or on the meaning the results had for Mendel himself?a problem that is still at the center of historians' attention. He records the new interpretations but seems to prefer the conventional view of Mendel as the brilliant discoverer, far ahead of his time, of the "laws of heredity" as we understand them today. However, his faithful recording of the arguments for and against this view show that those who contend that "Mendel was not a Mendelian," and that he was not after the "laws of heredity" in the modem sense, are arguing a strong case.

Bert Theunissen

Pais, Abraham. A tale of two continents: A physicist's life in a turbulent world. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvi, 511 p.: illus.

Abraham Pais was one of the top theoretical physicists of the middle of this century; he then turned to history of science and wrote biographies of Einstein and Bohr and a history of early 20th century microphysics. Along the way he encountered his two biographical subjects and many other prominent physicists. The two continents of the title refer both to Europe and America and to what Pais calls the life of science and daily life (if an ocean indeed separates the latter two). In the first section Pais describes his childhood and adolescence as a Dutch Jew in interwar Europe and then provides a chilling account of the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Pais lost his sister and close friends to the

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Nazis and landed in prison himself after years of hiding, surviving by luck and the offices of good people. The painfully forthright memoir sticks in the reader's mind.

After the war Pais moved to the United States after a sojourn at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen and soon settled at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The second, longer portion of the book chronicles in a series of anecdotes Pais's many personal and professional accomplishments (and a few

pitfalls) in the U.S., with scattered descriptions of some of his scientific work. He offers an inside view of the postwar IAS under Oppenheimer's direction, describes his many travels and his move in 1963 to Rockefeller University, gives advice about writing history, and sketches the personalities of many twentieth-century physicists.

Peter J. Westwick

Ruestow, Edward G. The microscope in the Dutch Republic: The shaping of discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii, 348 pp.: illus.

Ruestow points to several cultural currents in the early Dutch Republic making for microscopical studies: the advanced state of subtle anatomy in the medical schools; the technique of Dutch miniaturists, who liked to paint insects; a preco cious Cartesianism, with its fancies of tiny pores and particles; and a religion eager to adduce evidence of the cleverness of the Creator in the contrivances of his creation. Happily, the story did not follow this social-constructivist plot; the currents carried no traffic to the microscope until Marcello Malpighi's pioneer ing work stimulated two borderline characters, Jan Swammerdam and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, to try to outdo him. Ruestow explains that subtle anatomists

preferred the then new technique of injection, miniaturists were concerned with illusion, Cartesians did not care to hazard their theory, and Calvinists stopped at wonders they could see with the naked eye. When Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek took up the work around 1670, however, the techniques and social support of the anatomists, miniaturists, corpuscularists, and admirers of the wisdom of God were there to be mobilized.

Ruestow's plot requires a circumstantial account of the borderline charac teristics of the first great Dutch microscopists. Swammerdam is easy: trained as a doctor, skilled as an anatomist, consumed by ambition, zealously religious, he refused to practice medicine or to have much else to do with human society. He exercised his skill, consulted his vanity, and avoided his fellows by studying the innards of insects. His delight in the work rattled his conscience. For

although every dissection of insects revealed further evidence of the wisdom behind it all, Swammerdam worried that his enjoyment of their little bodies and his pride in his skill at opening them were sins of vanity and concupiscence.

Leeuwenhoek did not suffer from unsociability within his native circle of successful tradesmen and municipal officials. He took up microscopy initially because he liked to work with his hands. When he began to see things that oth ers could not, he spun off this circle toward the tourbillon of the learned, which he could not penetrate. Although he received encouragement to pursue his

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studies from a few Dutch savants and from the Royal Society of London, his lack of languages and crudity of manners kept him from entering the society at which he aimed. According to Ruestow, just to maintain himself at the margin Leeuwenhoek had to continue to reveal microscopical wonders. Hence his fifty years of labor with his magnifying glasses.

Neither Swammerdam nor Leeuwenhoek could have started a tradition in

microscopical research. But few notable discoveries were made anywhere with the help of the microscope during the 18th century. Ruestow ascribes this dearth not to the poor quality of the instruments or the difficulty of using them but to the absence of the social and institutional infrastructure of modem sci ence. This is only to say that microscopy during the 18th century was an 18th

century pursuit. Ruestow's scholarship, writing, and exploration of motives are exemplary.

J.L. Heilbron

Shortland, Michael, and Richard Yeo, ed. Telling lives in science: Essays on

scientific biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv, 295

pp.

This volume is premised upon a resurgence of biography, a trend the editors view as a reaction against a historiography downplaying the individual life in science. The collection's essays fall into three disconnected categories. First, there are analyses of the social shaping of (largely popular) biographies, for

instance, of Faraday (Geoffrey Cantor), Banks (John Gascoigne), or Nightingale (Martha Vicinus). One meets few surprises here. Next are some wider

reaching studies of scientific biography as a genre over the years. These include

suggestive pieces by Richard Yeo on dictionaries and encyclopedias and, most

thoughtfully, by Dorinda Outram on autobiographies during the French Revolu tion; one also finds Michael Hunter's account of biographies of Boyle, David

Knight's thoughts on Davy's understanding of his career, and Roy Porter's loose-limbed meditation on Beddoes as physician and writer. Framing the col lection are two arguments about how contemporary scientific biography should be done: James Moore tells stories about his work on Darwin and Thomas

Soderqvist, in the volume's most ambitious and coherent piece, makes a case for his existentialist understanding of biography. The editors try to integrate these scattered and sometimes narrow contributions, but the long introduction

brings in so many themes that it cannot keep everything tied together. One

might have hoped for a more sustained focus on persistent issues like the audi ences for the genre and the rift between popular and academic biography. Nonetheless, the collection is of interest, if more for the parts than for the whole.

Cathryn Carson