A guide to the archives and manuscripts of The Royal Society

thinkers, the "science of man" meant exactly that and did not include women; and that "nature" provided the foundation of difference, not its erasure. Additional exploration of the meaning of "science" is provided by Phillip Sloan in his magisterial essay on the natural history of man. He concentrates on Linnaeus and Buffon, practising scientists with very different views of what constituted human science. The ultimate synthesis of Linnaean classification with Buffon's historical view of development underlay much nineteenth-century discourse on humans as animals. Roy Porter's essay on 'Medical science and human science' underlines the uncertain relationship between these two topics. While medicine became more scientific-in theory if not in practice-over the course of the eighteenth century, the role of medicine in the larger Enlightenment project remained ambiguous. Despite Peter Gay's assertion that medicine was central to the Enlightenment "recovery of nerve", Porter sees not a causal arrow but a complex interplay of ideas among which medicine was one of many. Gloria Flaherty's account of the so-called "nonnormal sciences" such as mesmerism, Franz Joseph Gall's "organology" and Johann Caspar Lavater's notions of physiognomy serves to undermine yet more the claims to science of eighteenth-century medicine. Essays on society, politics, and political economy further extend the range of human science. This volume provides a good introduction to some of the central questions of Enlightenment thought. A collection of essays, when it is as well-organized as this one, can be worth far more than the sum of its parts.