A natural history of vision

strictly European. This classification has certainly given her difficulties in writing her narrative histories but it lends itself readily enough to a bibliography. Perhaps the structure leaves too little to chance. It is odd to find Buffon and Walter Charleton bracketed in the same time span ('Biologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries') and counter-intuitive to search for Blumenbach and Lamarck among nineteenth-century biologists, although in a strict sense this is indeed the case. Yet her categories for special problems are illuminating, covering themes such as 'The development of life', which includes all the preformation and epigenesis literature as well as spontaneous generation and conception/ fertilization. Under the general heading of 'Ideas', she provides a useful survey of diverse concepts such as the chain of being, Newtonianism in biology, physicotheology, Lamarckism and recapitulation, ending up with cybernetics (only four titles-not as many as might be expected). The individual disciplines are also interpreted generously to include areas like morphology, microbiology, ecology, anthropology and molecular biology. Contrary to other bibliographers of the life sciences, Baumer is unusual in dividing her material according to leading ideas or practices rather than to conventional natural history categories dictated by actual animals or plants (ichthyology, ornithology, etc.). It is good to see parasitology included, although this gets more citations than plant physiology which is often a poor relation in the historical line-up. Plant morphology seems not to include phyllotaxy (the spiral arrangement of leaves) but I could have got lost in the subsections. Where Baumer excels is in her meticulous attention to German biology and history of biology. Her choice of influential figures casts a refreshingly different light on the contours of European science and because she expressly focuses on biologists, rather than on naturalists or medical men, she finds a certain leeway in pushing more widely than most bibliographies. She includes many sources which I have not come across before. The book is obviously intended to cross the language barrier with title and headings in double translation. Sections on genetics, heredity, cell theory, electron microscopy, neurophysiology, and biochemistry all show the value of such an approach. Historians of medicine will surely find it extremely useful. In A natural history of vision Nicholas Wade charts "the course of descriptions of visual phenomena for the period up to 1840". The book focuses on experiential vision as opposed to optics or ophthalmology, though Wade recognizes their close relationship …