Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century, ed. by Robert C. Leitz and Kevin L. Cope (review)

76 century antiquarian and natural philosopher . A dynamic Royal Society figure, William Stukeley aimed to integrate contemporary natural philosophy and orthodox theology into a common and persuasive enterprise. He ranged through anatomies of elephants, crocodile fossils , and studies of the brain—all part of the ‘‘Book of Nature.’’ But he is most admired as a ‘‘pioneer’’ of field archaeology ; the detailed and carefully illustrated studies of Stonehenge and Avebury have long been the focus of those interested in the development of antiquarian and archaeological practice. Earlier studies, as a useful Foreword by Michael Hunter explains, especially by the eminent prehistorian Stuart Piggott (William Stukeley: an EighteenthCentury Antiquary, 1985), were most concerned to plot Stukeley’s erudition and scholarship on to a history of the archaeological discipline. Mr. Haycock’s work is more ambitious and more deeply researched, contextualizing Stukeley’s erudition within the broader intellectual and religious debates and discourses of the time. Mr. Haycock provides a compelling and important window into an eighteenthcentury mind. As other studies by Brian Young (Religion and Enlightenment, 1998) and more recently by Rosemary Sweet (Antiquaries. The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 2004) have shown, clerical thinking was neither closed nor moribund. Often Anglophone culture has been dismissed as regressive and disengaged. Mr. Haycock’s Stukeley is an important counterbalance, which opens up a different perspective on the nature of the relationship between religion and science in the period. One of Stukeley’s significant projects was to accommodate the still avant garde Newtonianism of his day to the Trinitarianism of the established church. As Mr. Haycock shows by meticulous new scholarship, those who set out to defend orthodoxy against the impious, the deistical, and the outright atheistical were not intellectual conservatives . Stukeley’s researches on the antiquities of the Druids establishes that he was capable of both original investigation and appropriating hostile or heterodox erudition. For example, he absorbed Toland’s posthumously published (1726) specimens on the history of the Druids and Celtic learning. Where Toland saw anticlerical models in antiquity, Stukeley imagined evidence of an ancient and ‘‘patriarchal Christianity.’’ Commenting that Toland’s learning was impressive, he was also capable of neutralizing the irreligion prompted in such works. As Mr. Haycock establishes in the final chapters of his thickly textured study, Stukeley’s work was not marginal. His researches into the history of religion, the origins and nature of matter and life, and the innovative studies of the Druids had a persistent afterlife into the nineteenth century. Today these researches might look like dead ends alongside the eminent discoveries of the period, but Mr. Haycock’s thoughtful contextual study of Stukeley ought to command a readership of all those interested in the intellectual life of the period. Justin Champion Royal Holloway Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the ‘‘Long’’ Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert C. Leitz and Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS, 2004. Pp. xv ⫹ 361. $91.50. The unifying theme of these heterogeneous essays is how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers ‘‘imagine’’ 77 various scientific concerns. In ‘‘From Aeolus to Aerology, or, Boreas meets the Barometer,’’ Barbel Czennia charts the development of the new science of meteorology and then shows how different poets (from More, Cavendish, Marvell, and Finch to Thompson and Darwin) gradually incorporate more and more ‘‘science’’ into their literary descriptions of storms and showers. It is a familiar progression: mythology and theology give way to empirical observation. In this exhaustive survey of ‘‘barometric’’ literature, I am surprised that no mention is made of Barometri Descriptio, the celebrated Neo-Latin poem by Joseph Addison. As a kind of coda, Ms. Czennia offers a brief but fascinating glimpse of pioneering balloonists (Sadler , Charles, Baldwin, Blanchard) and how they write about their daring exploits . Some essays are weaker than others. ‘‘The Mad Scientist’’ by Barbara Benedict and ‘‘The Consumption of Meat’’by George Rousseau are lightweight but entertaining. In ‘‘A God who Must: Science and Theological Imagination,’’Paul Johnston finds common ground between two antithetical American thinkers, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. James Buickerood (‘‘Cracks in the Cement of the Universe’’) writes a dull essay on the role of the imagination in the works of Descartes, Newton...