_NA_~____ vo_L_.3~12~~~~NO~~~_ER __ l9M_______________________ AUTUMNBCXJKS-----------------------------------------z_zt emerges as a cosmopolitan liberal, scarcely contemporary political events. Science, for Changing science for religious, a friend of erstwhile Jacobins all the propaganda, did not (indeed does (who attended his wedding) and champion not) inhabit a world of supralunary purity. the time of working-class education - aspects at In Lamarck, L.J. Jordanova presents a Adrian Desmond odds with the prevailing caricature. In a corroborative view. Lamarck's debt to the scintillating discussion of Cuvier's "cata­ anti-authoritarian ideologues, disliked by Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and strophist" Discours (1812), Outram asserts Napoleon, counted against him during the Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. that - far from Scriptural kow-towing - Empire, when the re-establishment of order became imperative. Jordanova has By Dorinda Outram. Cuvier's abandonment of theological brought together the latest research on Manchester University Press: 1984. Pp. dogma led him to de-emphasize "causes" Lamarck, shaping it into the Oxford Past 299. £25, $32.50. and endorse a historical descriptive Masters format. She depicts the late Lamarck. approach. He demanded the "epistemo­ By L.J. Jordanova. logical autonomy" of geology, staked its Oxford University Press: 1984. Pp. 118. claim to the ''new worlds of time'' and, in Hbk £7.95; pbk £1.95. an effort to conquer Lamarck's rival empire of conchology, founded the speciality of palaeontology, modelled after CUVIER'S aggrandisements have become a the new historical criticism. Outram's historiographic byword. The creator of method is beguiling, and her imperial stratigraphic palaeontology was also metaphors capture an expansionist era. Napoleon's Inspector-General of Studies, This is a history of campaigns against Councillor of State from 1816 until his competitors and annexations of nature: death in 1832, and Grand-Master of the Cuvier's hostility towards Lamarck is a Protestant Faculties. Darwinian "territorial conflict" for control of the propagandists derided him as a bureaucrat invertebrates. Patronage, property and c and bibliolater. Cuvier might have power are the rewards for a successful play­ j founded what Camille Limoges calls the off between social contingencies and 8 "Macedonian Empire" of comparative natural resources. anatomy, but he is still ritually censured in For Outram, science is a "cultural popular histories for leading the state commodity"; careers do not happen, they opposition to Lamarck. Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829): legacy was are made - hence her approach to not transformism, but taxonomy. Dorinda Outram's Georges Cuvier, a Cuvier's rise, both in the Museum deeply-reasoned attack on such rubber­ d'Histoire Naturelle and Conseil d'Etat. Enlightenment ideologues promoting a stamp historiography, is a towering She constantly questions the "heroic" view rational science of man and redirecting achievement in the "naturalization" of of affairs and shows that "disinterested" naturalists to the influence of science history. Provocative, occasionally science is itself a myth of the scientific elite: environment. Lamarck's environ­ a self-validating argument that requires a mentalism, classificatory precision and constant sanitization of history. That myth attitude to transformed man are evidence was even more essential in Cuvier's day. of this debt. Given the uncertainties after the Terror But the enigma remains: Jordanova's ( 1793-1794), proclaiming a neutral ground Lamarck comes across as a minor noble­ could gain a savant immunity: "Whoever man in favour of the Revolution, a controlled the public exposition of such Heraclitean figure capable of majestic bio­ myths" of a politically-untainted science, logical visions, who remained at heart a she says, "was in a position to gain great sea-shell systematist. His legacy to the public authority". The struggle to control following generation was not trans­ the language of science climaxed during the formism, but taxonomy: even English 1830 Revolution, when Geoffroy chal­ evangelicals, who execrated his ungodly lenged Cuvier's asocial ethos and used flights, paid homage to his conchological "popularist rhetoric" to drum up radical classification. support for his romantic morphology Lamarck is an admirable primer, and based on unity of plan. Jordanova's strength comes from her With patronage networks ramifying emphasis on the continuity between through the political, banking and Lamarck's transformism and earlier Georges Cuvier (1769-1832): play-off between science and political expediency. scientific worlds, one can see why Cuvier theories of life and classification. Lamarck was forced to tailor his scientific claims to the ancien regime rationalist, old­ conjectural, it is always absorbing. Outram political expediences; society was volatile fashioned chemist and obsessive meteo­ has colonized terrain between cognitive and his power-base unstable. He had to rologist became Lamarck the transformist sociology and psychology, dissecting the renegotiate claims with successive masters shortly after the Terror. He died a blind complex relationship between the indi­ during the Revolution, Empire and Restor­ pauper in 1829, and was interred by Cuvier vidual, state and science that was forged ation, which entailed subtle modifications with a derogatory eloge. Cuvierian during the French Revolution. This is not a of his scientific stance. Outram reveals officialdom could certainly be heavy study of Cuvier's comparative anatomy, how, in turn, he met the challenge of handed. But now Outram has taken us but of his public persona as a savant- not revolutionary democratization, capitalized behind the politicking which made it so the textbook history of transcendent on the colonial predations of the essential in a turbulent age. 0 genius, but a living biography of a man revolutionary army, combatted forming alliances and entering into Napoleonic "egoism", and retained power Adrian Desmond is an Honorary Research "micropolitical" negotiations to advance during the reaction, in part by modifying Fellow in the Department of Zoology and his career. the rhetoric and content of his geology and Comparative Anatomy, University College The ossified image of Cuvier is that of London, and author of Archetypes and zoology. In short, she has made splendid Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London the stern "legislator of science", arrogant, play of the mediating structures between 1850-1875 (Blond & Briggs, 1982/University of unyielding and conservative. Here he the public language of science and Chicago Press, 1984). © 1984 Nature Publishing Group.