Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise by Frederic Lawrence Holmes

1106 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The comparison between Britain and the Continent in the Indus­ trial Revolution “has been a popular pastime among economic historians for many decades now, though a consensus has failed to emerge” (p. 239). Despite a long digression on the impact of the patent system and other technicalities, Mokyr does not provide a new explanation either for Britain’s advantage in the age of steam and cotton or for its relative decline in the late 19th century. This chapter serves more as a review and critique of the literature than as a guide to the perplexed. At the end of his book, Mokyr offers us an essay comparing bio­ logical evolution and technological progress, an argument he calls “analogy as heuristic.” While he is not the first to attempt such an analogy, he pursues it far beyond the usual platitudes. Like biologists, he finds equilibrium or stagnation to be the norm and innovation to be the issue demanding explanation. He argues that while most changes are marginal (“microevolution” or “microinventions”), the important ones are quite sudden and occur in clusters. Here he joins saltationists like Stephen Jay Gould, a minority sect among evolution­ ists. Whether biologists will appreciate this outside intervention is not certain, but then, Mokyr reminds us that Darwin’s theory of evolution was inspired by the ideas ofthat great social scientist, Thomas Malthus. For Mokyr, unlike Malthus, economics is the cheerful science: there is progress, technological change is a free lunch, and it comes from creativity and tolerance. This is an original book, and economists (if not biologists) will be debating it for years to come. Historians of technology will also welcome a work this rich in ideas and this useful on so many levels, from the introductory to the most theoretical. Daniel R. Headrick Dr. Headrick specializes in the history of technology and international relations. His latest book is The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics 18511945 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise. By Frederic Lawrence Holmes. Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California (543 Stephens Hall 94720), 1989. Pp. ii+144; illustrations, notes, appendixes, index. $16.00 (paper). This slim but profoundly informed volume consists of five lectures delivered at the first International Summer School in History of Science, held in Bologna in 1988. The substantive core of Holmes’s book is contained in chapters 2 and 3, where he provides brief but persuasive accounts of two related research traditions of central concern to chemists in the French Academy of Sciences in the latter TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1107 half of the 17th century and throughout the 18th century. The first of these addressed the chemistry of salts and resulted in the develop­ ment of influential new experimental techniques, taxonomies, and theories. The second addressed problems associated with the chemi­ cal analysis of plants. Having established a secure beachhead in pre-Lavoisian chemistry, Holmes then surveys, in chapters 1 and 5, current interpretations of 18th-century chemistry and Lavoisier’s achievement. He correctly detects and criticizes anachronisms in the accounts of pre-Lavoisian chemistry provided by those who celebrate the Chemical Revolution, and he objects to microstudies of Lavoisier’s achievement that seek to unearth what John Heilbron, in his introduction, calls interpretive philosophers’ stones that reveal all. Holmes’s historiographic judg­ ments are unfailingly considered and informative, and anyone curi­ ous about the origins of modern chemistry would be well advised to study this book with care. Historians of technology will find chapter 4, “Chemistry and Industry,” of particular interest. Holmes revisits the 18th-century relations between science and industry in the context of chemistry. He again sniffs out anachronism, especially in the presumption that when we refer to science we are speaking only of theoretical knowledge. As the title of this book indicates, Holmes takes a much more accommo­ dating view of science. Doing so enables him to argue that while the industrial production of vitriolic acid in the 18th century owed nothing to scientific theory, it clearly benefited from the analytic procedures and other craft techniques that, as Holmes demonstrates, were central to the “investigative enterprise” of

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