Yale's Medical Historical Library, Where I Work. Too Expensive for Individual Purchase, the Dmb Is, Rather, a Major Reference Resource for All Academic Libraries. Toby A. Appel

Among the many telling episodes included in John Carson's account of efforts to measure merit is one concerning the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, founded in 1859. In order to discuss the comparative weights of brains or the prehistoric use of hatchets, Paul Broca and his followers had to agree to allow a police spy to attend all their meetings, for, as the government saw it, such science was fraught with political significance. It is this intertwining of science and politics, sometimes overt but more often covert, that forms the core of Car-son's cogently argued, deeply researched, and highly original study tracing the history of scientific attempts to assess human differences. Carson's approach to such a broad subject is both impressive and distinctive in at least three ways. First, his study is cross-cultural, for he shows how similar scientific questions were asked and answered in France and the United States. Second, whereas many historians have connected contemporary debates to scientific battles pitting nature against nurture that largely took shape in the nineteenth century, Carson traces their origins to an older and more nuanced set of ideas closely tied to eighteenth-century revolutionary traditions. Finally, Carson places language, discourse, and meanings at the center of his investigation, for he pays particular attention to both scientific conceptualizations and popular understandings of an amorphous set of linguistic terms—terms such as " talents, " " faculties , " " intelligence, " and " merit. " Carson's study begins with the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who boldly proclaimed the fundamental equality of man and the illegiti-macy of hereditary systems of privilege. In the wake of the American and French revolutions, such ideas invested new political significance in any science that could explain the only human differences still considered legitimate—that is, those based on nature. In both countries, Carson argues, this generated a " visible rhetoric of republican equality " paralleled by a " shadow language " of natural inequality (p. xiii). Carson explores these languages by focusing on works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the abbé de Condil-lac, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius, as well as the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Thus, as Carson astutely notes, while Jefferson addressed inequality by calling for a " natural Aristocracy " grounded in " Virtue and Talents, " Adams saw such language as disguising rather than clarifying the issues involved. " Fashion has introduced an indeterminate Use of the Word Talents, …