Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century

Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century. Ed. by Robert C. Leitz III and Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS. 2004. xvi+ 361 pp.; 23 ills. $91.50. ISBN 0-404-63543-1.

There is an exuberance about this book to match the exuberance of science and pseudo-science in the long eighteenth century. Carious teeth, mad physicians, chronic headache, and, of course, weather are some of the subjects explored in this welcome book on science and discourse. Here is an outline of the contents.

Barbel Czennia's 'From Aeolus to Aeology; or, Boreas Meets the Barometer: Clouds, Winds, and Weather Observation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry' surveys emerging views of weather as a scientific phenomenon among poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ranging through Andrew Marvell, Ann Finch's 'Upon the Hurricane' (1703), James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-30), and culminating in Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791), the essay documents and anticipates changing sensibilities in a wide-ranging survey that reveals much on...