Vickers, Brian

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256 Book Reviewsstarting-point for an investigation of Barrow'sbook—at least before the present translationappeared—is A. E. Shapiro's edition (1984) ofthe Optical Lectures, 1670—72 of Newton,which themselves languished in MS. until afterNewton's death. Newton's lectures owedmuch to Barrow's, which they followed; oncertain points Newton was content to let Bar-row say the last word.Building on the foundations of Kepler,Descartes and Huygens, Barrow's object wasto determine the paths of light through lens,and so the formation and position of images.The technical problems he has to solve in histreatment are neither experimental norphysiological but purely geometrical, andthough his technique was soon to be superse-ded Barrow showed great skill in his solutions.As is well known Barrow's statements aboutthe physics of light were unadventurous: heknew no way of deciding whether light is acorpuscular stream or an action diffusedthrough transparent media. His guesses aboutthe qualitative differences between light of var-ious colours are barely intelligible (end of Lec-ture XII). Though Barrow's English sermonshave been admired, he is not (to my mind)easy to read in Latin, as in the following (ran-domly noted) sentence, where the thought iseasy enough: 'Images, however, are clearly no-thing but light, so reflected or refracted fromobjects that it is again gathered together inone place, and in such a position as it hadwhen it issued from the original object.' I pre-fer my literal rendering to that printed here('. . . collected again in one place and in a dis-ition such as it held when it flowed . . .'),because the word disposition does not carrythe sense of spatial order which is clearly in-tended (W. Whewell (ed.) MathematicalWorks of Isaac Barrow (1860), II, 14; thistranslation, p. 13).The difficult task of rendering Barrow intoEnglish was undertaken and printed by theWorshipful Company of Spectacle Makers asa pious tribute to a great early Englishexponent of lens-theory, and is less directedto professional historians than to professionalopticians. The historical notes are brief butadequate, the general layout helpful especiallyas regards modernization and interpretation.I found the English on the stiff side, but acomprehensible version of a book that hasbeen far more often mentioned than read mustbe warmly welcomed.A. RUPERT HALLTackley, OxfordGRAHAM REES assisted by CHRISTOPHERUPTON. Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy:A New Source. A transcription of manuscriptHardwick 72A with translation and commen-tary. Chalfont St Giles, Bucks.: British Societyfor the History of Science, 1984. £7.90.Among the many documents unearthed byPeter Beal in preparing his epoch-makingIndex of Literary Manuscripts Vol. 1: 1450—1625 (London: Mansell, 1980) were twomanuscripts by Francis Bacon in the libraryof Chatsworth House. Bacon's literary ac-tivities were, of course, intensive and varieg-ated, employing at times several amanuensesto produce fair draughts of his work, whichwould then become the basis for further elab-oration. His literary Nachlass must have beenconsiderable, although little has surfaced. Ina letter to Robert Boyle on 9 November 1663(not known to Bacon scholars, it would seem)Dr John Beale recorded how, when Boyle firstmet him at Eton, in the time of Sir HenryWottonI was reputed a schoolman (though I hadthen read thoroughly much more of lordBacon than is yet printed, having seen inmanuscript all his embryos, his gradusrerum & gradus verborum; and the pre-faces, and joints, and ancephalseosis to allhis judgments as lord chancellor; whichraised me a little above a mere schoolman. . . (Robert Boyel, Works ed. T. Birch, 6vols, 21772; VI, 355).One would give a great deal to see those manu-scripts, or to know what has become of them.The'embryo' here reproduced is a draughtof a treatise called De viis mortis, et de senec-tute retardanda, atque instaurandis viribus('An inquiry concerning the ways of death, theavailable at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400024845Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:12:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,Book Reviews 257postponing of old age, and restoration of thevital powers'). Graham Rees, the editor,acknowledges the assistance of ChristopherUpton in translating the piece; he has himselfprovided a meticulous transcription and a fullintroduction (78 pages) describing the workand setting it both in its general context inRenaissance natural philosophy and inBacon's intellectual development. He arguesconvincingly that the two treatises designatedby Peter Beal in fact belong together, a charac-teristic Baconian mingling of aphorisms withmore continuous prose sections, and dates itto about 1611, with later revisions, Baconabandoning it 'unfinished at some time before1620'. Rees reconstructs in fascinating detailBacon's habits of composition and revision,and places it in what he has called 'Bacon'sspeculative • philosophy', the 'alternative'strand of thought that he has defined runningin parallel with Bacon's better-known workon induction and scientific method. While infact Bacon's programme for a comprehensive'Natural History', embracing all aspects of na-ture and life, was much more influential in theseventeenth century than his cumbersomelogic, I feel that Rees overvalues the 'specula-tive philosophy'. His expositions, in articlesin Ambix and elsewhere, of what he callsBacon's 'semi-Paracelsian cosmology' (whichhalf of Paracelusus? one wants to ask), seemsto be doubtful on several heads, and here heoverstates both the amount of this vein ofthinking in Bacon ('the huge volume ofspeculative materials') and its importance('unique . . . important. . . seminal . . . abso-lutely crucial . . . crucial synaptic event'). Theembarrassing fact that proponents of thisthesis must .account for is why Bacon, if hethought that this constituted a 'worthwhilebody of substantive natural philosophy',should have not published it, and aborted theembryos.But apart from these doubts about theoverall value of this fragmentary treatise, theintroduction offers a useful account of theRenaissance doctrine of spirits, and variouscompeting theories on the prolongation of life.The translation is serviceable, the textual andcritical notes very helpful. All in all, the stan-dards of accuracy and dedication to the textaugur well—'I heard a bird so sing'—for thewelcome project of a new edition of Bacon'scomplete works, over which Dr Rees is to pres-ide.BRIAN VICKERSETH ZiirichTHOMAS SODERQVIST. The Ecologists, fromMerry Naturalists to Saviours of the Nation:A sociologically informed narrative survey ofthe ecologization of Sweden 1895-1975.Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1986. Pp.vii+330. ISBN 91-22-00827-6. No pricegiven.This book ought to be very welcome. Ecologyin other countries, especially those of Northernand Eastern Europe, has always been some-what inaccessible to British readers—evenpractising ecologists. This is not only due toa barrier of language, important though thathas been. There is also the difficulty that thetechnical content of ecology in those countrieshas traditionally been somewhat distinct fromthe Anglo-American variety. Indeed, as FrankEgler pointed out some time ago and asSoderqvist vividly re-exemplifies, the term'ecology' itself means something different toEuropean and American vegetation scientists.So one of the principal questions a Britishreviewer must ask is—how far Soderqvist hassucceeded in making the history of Swedishecology accessible and intelligible to an Eng-lish-speaking audience?Regarded from this perspective, the bookhas two major limitations. One is thatSoderqvist assumes rather more backgroundknowledge of the Swedish academic systemthan the average British reader, if this revieweris at all representative, may reasonably be ex-pected to possess. The other is that he hasdeliberately and self-consciously set out to tellthe story of ecology in one country, with verylittle international contextualization. Thus,it is very difficult to compare events inSoderqvist's Sweden with the development of,for example, British ecology. The effects ofavailable at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400024845Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:12:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Book Review: Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy: A New Source: ReesGraham assisted by UptonChristopher. Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy: A New Source. A transcription of manuscript Hardwick 72A with translation and commentary. Chalfont St Giles, Bucks.: British Society for the History of Science, 1984. £7.90

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