During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the scene of several lively debates concerning the structure of the Earth. Though the ideas of groups like the ‘Wernerians’ and the ‘Huttonians’ have received due attention, little has been done to explicate the practice of mineralogy as it existed in the decades before the debates. To dig deeper into the eighteenth-century subject that formed the foundation of nineteenth-century geology in Scotland, this essay concentrates on Rev. Dr John Walker, the University of Edinburgh's Professor of Natural History (1779–1803). In pursuing this topic, it builds on an earlier BJHS article in which I excavated his early career as a mineralogist (1749–79). After first addressing a few historiographical points and the provenance of the student manuscripts upon which this study is based, I explain the method that Walker used to arrange minerals. I then move on to show that, like his younger attempts at mineralogical classification, his mature system was based predominantly upon chemistry. This sets the stage for the last half of the essay where I reconstruct the mineralogical system that Walker taught to the hundreds of students who sat in his natural history lectures from 1782 until 1800. I then conclude with a few observations about the relevance of his mineralogy to the scientific community of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh.

This paper examines Robert Willis's science of ‘mechanism’, its relation to the later mechanics textbooks of William Whewell, and its promotion as the key to appreciating, understanding and contriving machinery in Victorian Britain. Responsive, first, to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and later to student audiences at Cambridge, Willis constructed a science of ‘mechanism’ in both words in print and works in practice. With Whewell's sanction in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Willis's Principles of Mechanism (1841) elaborated a science of kinematics expressing geometry in motion without considerations of force. With Willis's approval, Whewell's Mechanics of Engineering (1841) began to complete and systematize a projected science of machinery, now separated from previous accounts of mechanics. Their joint project put ‘mechanism’ and the ‘mechanics of engineering’ into print in Britain as adjuncts to a liberal education in Cambridge; further, with the rapid expansion of academic provision for practical engineers from 1838 to 1841, these two Fellows offered their progeny as essential fodder further afield. Reactions to this two-pronged attack varied. But it was, perhaps, Willis's work with elaborate demonstration lectures, using special apparatus built by London mechanists and marketed by educational entrepreneurs, that effectively disseminated the new science.

Although Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) is frequently cited by historians in relation to the impact of evolutionary theories on the Victorian churches, attention has not been paid to the audiences of working-class men in Glasgow for whom the papers were originally constructed. By drawing upon the notebook in which the author sketched out the series of addresses, in addition to materials relating to the interpretative habits of these audiences; I am able to consider the text as a work of practical apologetics rather than as a contribution to elite intellectual debate. This paper promises to open up new lines of enquiry with regard to the materials with which working-class audiences attempted to construct their own interpretations of contemporary scientific and religious issues. It also highlights Drummond's hitherto unrecognized use of specific practices of biblical exegesis and his debt to the work of the anatomist Richard Owen which, by keeping different forms of life distinct, and explaining organization as the effect of life already present, allowed the author to visualize the process of descent in terms of an inherent tendency to change in line with the unfolding of a pre-existing plan.

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.

Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.

Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (eds.), Cambridge Scientific Minds and David Millar, Ian Millar, John Millar and Margaret Millar, The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists. By Maria Yamalidou 466

Maria Michela Sassi, The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. By Laurence M. V. Totelin 467

H. L. L. Busard, Johannes de Tinemue's Redaction of Euclid's Elements, the So-called Adelard III Version. Volume I: Introduction, Sigla and Descriptions of the Manuscripts, Editorial Remarks, Euclides, Elementa. Volume II: Conspectus Siglorum, Apparatus Criticus, Addenda. By Jackie Stedall 468

Gerhard W. Kramer, The Firework Book: Gunpowder in Medieval Germany. By Simon Werrett 469

Robert Crocker (ed.), Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. By Scott Mandelbrote 470

Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750. By Owen Gingerich 471

Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician. By Georgette Ironside 472

J. Christiaan Boudri, What was Mechanical about Mechanics: The Concept of Force between Metaphysics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange. By Niccolò Guicciardini 473

Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World. By Graeme Gooday 474

Berit Pedersen (ed.), A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomological Society. By J. F. M. Clark 476

Richard Yeo, Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture 1800–1860. By Leigh D. Bregman 477

Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays. By Nick Fisher 478

Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry. A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. By Sophie Forgan 479

Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. By Kenneth F. Kiple 480

Greta Jones, ‘Captain of All these Men of Death’: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland. By Juliana Adelman 481

Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. By Hazel Hutchison 482

Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung. By Peter Zigman 484

Maggie Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines. By Sean Johnston 485

A. M. Moulin and A. Cambrosio (eds.), Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology/Dialogues entre soi: Questions historiques et débats contemporains en immunologie. By Pauline M. H. Mazumdar 486

Ioan James, Remarkable Mathematicians: From Euler to von Neutmann. By Claire Jones 487

Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba (eds.), Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development. By Adrian Rice 488

Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx (eds.), Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. By Leigh Clayton 490

Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. By Steven French 491