I was attracted by Lisa Jardine’s book because of my interest both in the history of science and in 17th-century England. But I must avow that it deceived me. One of the reasons is that Jardine does not seem to be well-acquainted with science: even if she is able to discuss it at length, she lacks precision on some particular points, and I found this sometimes irritating.

However, the book contains some interesting anecdotes, especially the one about Newton and Flamsteed, and the way Newton insisted on publishing Flamsteed’s History of the Heavens without the consent of the author. The arguments raised by Newton—Flamsteed’s salary paid from the public purse—and those raised by Flamsteed—instruments paid by himself for his personal use—are finally very modern. I was glad to learn that Flamsteed eventually gained authorization to destroy the last three hundred copies of the unduly published book.

An example of errors I could spot in the book is provided by Jardine’s telling—in her chapter Running Like Clockwork—that Cassini’s method for computing the longitude of an observation site from the motion of the first moon of Jupiter was accurate within one degree, ‘a distance at France’s latitude of about 60 miles’. This is true for one degree in latitude; but for one degree in longitude at about 45° in latitude, the corresponding distance is to be multiplied by 0.7 approximately, that is: about 40 miles.

Another topic of dissatisfaction is the way chapters are organized, with the same story told over and over again, with the same details. Jardine gives the impression to have written her chapters separately, then to have put them together without realizing that they partly contained the same information. An example among others is the way the original Greenwich observatory was built, money having been raised by selling surplus gunpowder from the third Dutch war, with materials coming from old Ordnance stocks. The story is told at length in chapter 1, and again in chapter 4, just in case the reader had forgotten. Similar repetitions happen all through the book, which sometimes gives the reader the impression of ‘pedalling in sauerkraut’, to use an imaged French phrase.

In conclusion: some interesting anecdotes, but the book is too loosely written, with many events repeated in different chapters, and also scientific imprecision. I do not really commend it. ( )

The theme of Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits is that scientific study and discovery most often occurs collaboratively or competitively, with information or theory or partial discovery by one person touching off experimentation or discovery by another. She focuses in this book on the late 17th and early 18th century in Europe, which saw an explosion of interest in science and the development of rigorous hypothesis and testing, with demonstrable, independently verified results.

Much like the wide-reaching interests of the Royal Society itself, Jardine ranges through an astonishing variety of subjects in this book--astronomy, microscopy, blood circulation, respiration, cellular structure, botany, air pressure, deep-sea diving--the list goes on and on. At times, I really wanted to wave my hands and beg her to slow down, so I could get more detail. This was what I found frustrating about the book, and it's certainly not the author's fault. It is by its nature an overview, so she couldn't get too in-depth about anything. However, I do fault her for bringing up the longitude problem several times, and various scientists' attempts to solve it, but never touching on John Harrison, who actually did invent a working marine chronometer.

The methods used by these scientists were fascinating and often crude, and in some instances stomach churning. The faint-of-heart should probably avoid the chapter that discusses circulation and respiration, since the studies on these were largely done via dog vivisection. Animal cruelty abounds in these pages, but the scientists also did quite a bit of study on themselves, particularly when they were testing medications.

I've read a lot of fiction set in this time period, and I was delighted to read about the real-life work of some (mostly) minor characters from those books, including Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Wilkins (all of whom appeared in Neal Stephenson's wonderful Baroque Cycle); Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon, and Nevil Maskelyne (from Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon); and many others. Robert Hooke holds a particular fascination for me, and I will be seeking out Jardine's biography of him, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London.

I would highly recommend Ingenious Pursuits to anyone with an interest in modern science as an essential look at its roots. ( )

An excellent overview of the early days of scientific inquiry in seventeenth and eighteenth century England and Europe. Back then, everything was new, and the same people might work on astronomy, architecture, medicine, anatomy, clocks, chemistry, mathematics, and other areas, all overlapping, with advances in one field inspiring advances in others. ( )