Book Review

Here, at last, is a book that skillfully narrates stories from the biological sciences in ways that demonstrate their connection to other aspects of American culture. Particularly attentive to the period from about 1850 to 1940, this study avoids making Darwinian evolution a dominant theme but concentrates instead on the institutional frameworks that were fundamental in establishing the study of the life sciences as "biology" and, for some, distinguished it from natural history. Philip J. Pauly writes well and with an eye for anecdote and the particulars of personality.

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Some of the material is familiar, woven from earlier articles by Pauly into this thematic book. Establishing self-definition among naturalists sharing common interests in reproduction and behavior, for example, was facilitated by the summer colony or "camp meeting" of biologists from across the country at Woods Hole Oceanographic Center. Public sensibilities about science were often linked to other social attitudes, as they were when the original gift of cherry trees from Japan to the United States proved to be infested, and echoed public concerns about "invasions" and "foreign pests" in the early twentieth century. One of the more interesting and informative techniques employed is a tour of scientific institutions in 1886–1887, loosely based on one taken across North America by Alfred Russel Wallace, that fixes the state of the natural sciences at the moment biology as a term and incentive became common in scientific parlance.

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