Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century ed. by John Bender and Michael Merriman (review)

327 expanding, with the methods of recording , comparison, and analysis that had been developed in the natural sciences beginning to be applied to other fields. But these fields developed at a very uneven rate, and so there was no single, overriding concept that governed collection and display. Thus, the Museum exhibited fossils, plants, and animals to illustrate contemporary notions of the Chain of Being, but it arranged books by the reign in which they were acquired, because, as one of the curators remarked, of ‘‘the pleasing sight which arises from the uniformity of elegant coverings in any considerable sett of books.’’And, because the age believed in the ideal of the polymath, the Museum’s avowed goal was to become an encyclopedia of the whole of human knowledge. The result of such an ambition was inevitable: ‘‘Nothing is in order,’’ remarked a foreign visitor in 1784; ‘‘this assemblage is rather an immense magazine, in which things seem to have been thrown together at random, than a scientific collection, intended to instruct and honour a great nation.’’ The twenty-two essays in Enlightening the British explore the origin, development , and gradual systematization of the British Museum, but also the course of Enlightenment knowledge and discovery itself. The methods and goals determining what objects were to be housed and how they were to be displayed and juxtaposed are carefully scrutinized . Scrutinized, too, are the forerunners of the Museum—the cabinets of curiosities, the repositories of universities and learned societies in England and on the continent, and the private collections of individuals such as Dr. Richard Mead, Daniel Solander, Martin Folkes, and the explorer and naturalist, Joseph Banks. Other essays deal with the ways conceptual and methodological advances were reshaping disciplines—how, for instance , numismatics and antiquarian research came to be put on a more modern footing, how the study of the classical world and British history evolved during the century, how new models of ethnographic thought emerged, and how art and sculpture and their relation to other disciplines were rethought. A few studies have a broad historical and intellectual sweep (particularly ambitious is Joseph Levine’s on the causes of the rise and fall of British neoclassicism ), but generally, this is history written close to the ground: most of the essays are narrow in scope, their aims specific and often modest, their findings firmly grounded in evidence patiently garnered from archives, guidebooks, acquisition files, bureaucratic records, and contemporary letters. But in a field that has sometimes provoked grand pronouncements undernourished by facts, such a volume is welcome and salutary. It is also generously illustrated. Dennis Todd Georgetown University Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Merriman. Stanford: Stanford , 2005. Pp. xiv ⫹ 287. $22.95. Papers from a conference on description , half already published by 1999, the meats are cold but tasty. The conference question, how ‘‘eighteenth-century thinkers forged from . . . an ‘unbroken surface,’ the principles of description upon which most—if not all—of the specialized disciplines of modern inquiry were erected?’’ Lorraine Daston’s ‘‘Description by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured’’ answers most clearly. Contrasting seventeenth-century 328 empiricism and its passion for singularity with mid-eighteenth-century uniformity (through Robert Boyle, chemist, and Charles Dufay, French physicist), she argues that between 1660 and 1730 the ‘‘prototypical scientific fact mutated . . . from a singular and striking event that could be replicated only with great difficulty, if at all, to a large and uniform class of events that could be produced at will.’’ The seventeenth century was fascinated with curiosities, anomalies, singularities that contradicted Aristotelian and scholastic norms. By the mideighteenth century a new normativity had been established, founded on empirical observation, eager to erase differences . Londa Schiebinger compares Hans Sloane’s and Maria Sibylla Merian’s account of Caribbean abortifacients and notes the colonial enterprise’s lack of interest in enabling European women to control their fertility through new discoveries in the West Indies. Wolfgang Klein discusses the disappearance of ‘‘realism’’ as a term in the eighteenth century: the ‘‘realist’’who opposed nominalism in the seventeenth century reemerged in the nineteenth century as an empiricist, his nature turned inside out. Elaine Scarry, on flowers...