Thinking about matter : studies in the history of chemical philosophy /

With more universal and easily accessible electronic publishing, book-length reprint collections may disappear. To give leading scholars like Brooke and Crosland the opportunity to select and reflect on a group of thematically related papers is valuable, and these collections are, as one would expect from these authors, very interesting. They include a wealth of bibliographical information; they are well bound and well printed (though the convenient size means a reduction of footnote font to a minimum). Nonetheless, given the prices of these two volumes in this series, one must argue hard for their merits to recommend their purchase. As Crosland says in his preface, "the diversity of journals and ... proceedings" is such that only "the author is likely to be aware of the existence of more than a few of the articles included," and only the richest of libraries would contain all the publications where these selections originally appeared. Each author has written a stage-setting preface; Crosland includes a valuable bibliography of his principal writings. Brooke chooses as his first selection a thoughtful overview and analysis of what he saw in 1991 as "recent trends in historiography," contrasting the approach to history of chemistry in the mid '60s to that in the '90s. In choosing the Chemical Revolution for his specific illustrations, this chapter from elusive conference proceedings makes an excellent introduction to Thinking about Matter and a useful accompaniment to three of the four chapters in Crosland's first section, "Science in the Enlightenment Period." Crosland's well-deserved stature as a pioneering explorer of French science and its institutions is evident in four chapters in the middle section of Studies in the Culture of Science .... The final section broadens the context to national and international issues. Brooke, too, exhibits his wide-ranging scholarship and influence on contemporary historiography by including important articles that focus on Priestley, Davy, Vitalism, Wohler, Berzelius, Laurent and Gerhardt, organic synthesis, Avogadro's hypothesis, and Kekule. This bare recital of names from chapter headings illustrates diversity but does not do justice to Brooke's thoughtful analyses, typical of his key contributions to the maturing of chemical historiography. Useful indexes, primarily for names. Though these volumes are expensive, they should be accessible to graduate students and faculty in history of science. E. R. Webster emerita, Wellesley College