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to portray the significant stages of the act of building throughout history,

through the use of an original chronological and thematic structure: project
design, materials used, the actual building work itself, the initiation of works
and the evolution into heritage status. Above all, it presents itself as a kind of
manifesto, arguing in favour of scientific recognition for a historical subject
that has been overlooked for too long. It takes an interdisciplinary approach
(from archaeology to the history of techniques and crafts, via economics and
law) plus a global approach (from the technical conditions of the art of build-
ing to architectural composition), and it draws on wide-ranging sources
(object, layout, oral history, iconography). For young researchers, it paves the
way in a fertile field of research set to bring about new-found understanding
of the changes affecting our built-up environment.

Robert Belot, Belfort, France

William R. Shea, ed. Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment.
Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publishers, 2000. Pp. 240. $39.95.

This is an important, if imperfect book. It is important in that we finally have

a work that reflects a genuine attempt at an interdisciplinary approach to the
subject of science and the visual arts. However, the book suffers from some
flaws, especially an unevenness in the quality of the essays.
The focus of Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment is on the
eighteenth century, but it would be good to see this choice of era explained,
or at least the promise of subsequent companion volumes; e.g., one on the fif-
teenth century, an era which saw the introduction of radical new concepts in
terms of the anatomical illustrations, ‘exploded’ views of machinery and the
use of visualizations to solve problems in the physical sciences. One could
imagine a similar volume for the nineteenth century, which saw a profusion
of scientific illustrations for the popularization of science, and a volume for
modern science (with, for example, Feynman diagrams). The book would
benefit from some acknowledgement, à la Needham, of the use of visual
images in science in Chinese culture, not just the West.
The book is divided into two parts: the first concerns the use of images in
the Enlightenment, and the second looks at images of nature in botanical
works, natural history studies and astronomical books. The division is some-
what peculiar, and the Enlightenment is never fully defined here. The
volume is a series of essays, most of which look at the use of images in dis-
cussing scientific themes, but there are a few, such as Werner Busch’s piece,
which stray from this. His contribution, on Joseph Wright of Derby, is
interesting but is more about artists’ portrayal of science in fine art, which
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is different from the use of visual images for the systematic exposition of
scientific ideas. On page 32 and page 83, for example, we see two famous
eighteenth-century paintings that include scientific apparatus, but these are
quite apart in significance from an image such as that on page 41, which is a
didactic illustration of a machine using weights.
The book has a preface, but lacks an introduction; the latter is certainly
needed, to explain the overall approach of the book, to provide a definition
of ‘visual imagery’ and note the source of these essays. On this last: some of
the essays seem to have been designed as scholarly articles, while others
appear to be more conference papers. Moreover, the ‘List of Contributors’
provides virtually no information about the authors’ specialties or scholarly
interests.
Reading through Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment, one
finds key issues discussed, although in an irregular fashion: why scientific
illustration flourished during this period, what purposes visual images served
in early scientific works and what influence the practice of illustration and
image-creation had on the philosophical foundations of science. Indeed, the
concept of the ‘visual image’ in science brings up multiple issues and themes:
didactic, investigatory, artistic and aesthetic, even religious. Interestingly,
however, there is nothing on maps here, even though the Enlightenment saw
a huge growth in the creation of empirical maps and charts, wonderful
examples of the visual image in the service of science.
The essays make a number of interesting points. William R. Shea notes
that scientific illustration had a legacy stretching from antiquity all the way
to the time of Diderot’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie (p. 39). Marco
Beretta’s essay looks at the use of iconography in early works of alchemy and
chemistry, and the connection of this practice to more modern illustrations
(pp. 57 ff.). Lucia Tongiorni Tomasi’s piece on the foundations of natural-
istic illustration explains how animals came to be depicted in their natural
habitat and the rise of ‘[v]eracity and didactic clarity’ in the new wave of
scientific illustration (p. 112).
One of the most interesting essays is Fernand Hallyn’s, in that it explores
what visual images in science actually do in semiotic terms (p. 89). Hallyn, in
discussing Leibniz, makes the vital point that ‘we [may] take the represent-
ation for the object itself ’ (p. 91); thus the use of visual images in science may
affect how we actually think about scientific phenomena. The other pieces in
this volume do not match Hallyn’s level of analysis, which brings critical
philosophical examination to the subject. Indeed, this essay would have been
better placed at the beginning of the collection, to set an analytic and the-
matic tone for the whole volume.
In sum, there are a number of intriguing and important ideas explored in
Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment, but one would like to see an
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expanded, re-organized, and more selective (in terms of relevance of the con-
tributions) edition.

Benjamin B. Olshin, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, eds. The Illusory Boundary:

Environment and Technology in History. Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 328. $29.50.

Over the past decade, scholars working in the seemingly divergent fields of
history of technology and environmental history have increasingly discovered
common ground, giving rise to a new interdisciplinary group sometimes
termed Envirotech. Reuss and Cutcliffe’s fine collection of essays is one of
the first systematic attempts to explore some emerging fundamental ideas
and methods in the field. At this early stage Envirotech has yet to fully crys-
tallize as a coherent approach, but the resulting fluidity is rich with potential.
Indeed, one of the virtues of the collected essays is the way they capture the
ongoing scholarly debates about the intersections between environment and
technology. Some of the authors take a fairly straightforward approach by ana-
lyzing how technology and environment mutually affect each other, a process
they generally see as mediated by complex socio-cultural forces. As James
Williams notes in an introductory overview, technology stands at ‘the junction
between humankind and nature’. The essays by Joel Tarr, Craig Colten and
William Rowley, demonstrate how technologies like cities and railroads are
inextricably linked with or embedded in natural systems – often to the point
that distinctions between the two become difficult to perceive. Other chapters
take this blurring of the boundaries between technology and environment (or
more broadly, humans and nature) as a more central topic of interest, thus sug-
gesting intriguing new methodological and analytical approaches. Joy Parr,
Sara Pritchard, Thomas Zeller, Edmund Russell and Ann Vileisis all offer
examples of the insights to be had by probing the line between technology and
environment itself. Clearly, genetically-engineered tomatoes remain ‘natural’ in
some sense, Vileisis suggests in her perceptive essay. Yet, few would probably
go so far as one proponent who argued, ‘I don’t see how man, in using recom-
binant DNA, is doing something unnatural when man is part of nature, too.’
All the authors offer evidence that the boundary between environment
and technology is indeed illusory. Yet, to some the boundary seems illusory
because it is highly permeable, while others see it as literally an illusion – that
is, nonexistent. Both approaches are useful, though the second is clearly the
more radical in its suggestion that historians of technology and historians of
the environment are essentially studying the same thing. If Edmund Russell