Les instruments scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles by Maurice DaumasReview by: George SartonIsis, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1953), pp. 391-392Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/227010 .

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Book Reviews 39I

given a place of honor in the background of liberalism. But whether or not one accepts Mr Vartanian's large claims for Diderot's humanistic importance, his enthusiasm for his subject does his book no discredit.

Mr Vartanian is himself a good Cartesian and an heir to the Enlightenment, and his treatment suffers occasionally from the defects of these great virtues. It exhibits, for example, a sort of Cartesian tendency to hypostatize abstracts. In handling the descent of ideas, he makes liberal use of metaphors, a large proportion of which employ liquid and hence highly malleable fig- ures of speech. Streams diverge, influences con- verge, concepts are refracted, currents of ideas flow uninterruptedly (even if underground) and eventually erupt to the surface. All this lends a certain air of unreality to the persistence of Cartesianism, and indeed Mr Vartanian himself has often to make some such remark as that its consequences were effective in "the broader, non- technical ambient" (p. 230), or "in the less tangible form of an all pervasive trait of the eighteenth-century French mind." (p. I35) Then too, although this is an essay in the his- tory of ideas, the organization and treatment are essentially unhistorical. No account is taken of how changes in society might have affected the transmission of ideas from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. Very little at- tention is paid to whatever influence the history and growth of science itself had upon the de- velopment of scientific naturalism.

Despite Mr Vartanian's defense of Diderot, one wonders whether he might not have done well to adopt the distinction between science and scientism which is emphasized by Professor von Hayek in the excellent little book just men- tioned? Mr Vartanian himself admits that in comparing Cartesianism and the scientific nat- uralism of the Enlightenment, he is comparing dissimilar things -a coherent philosophy and a loose scientific ideology. Or was the ideology, after all, scientistic? Mr Vartanian defines it as "an unsystematic grouping of interrelated no- tions and attitudes, suitable for wide dissemina- tion and the enlisting of public opinion in the pursuit of practical ends." (p. 21) What Des- cartes bequeathed to the philosophes was a set of concepts, not the positive elements of a sci- ence. Mr Vartanian is, of course, well aware that the science, as opposed to the scientific ideology, of the Enlightenment came largely from the Newtonian background (although this re- ceives very little emphasis), and that it was carried forward by people other than those he writes of. It is significant of the approach of this study that the central figures are Diderot, La Mettrie, Buffon, and D'Holbach, not Clair- aut, Reaumur, Lagrange, and Laplace. And the author does not take up, what might be an in- teresting subject, the question of the continuing influence of Descartes on science itself. He does, it is true, describe the Church as the main ob- stacle to the "maturing" of science in the eight-

eenth century (p. 317), and the philosophes' championing of the autonomy of science as their principal contribution to its history. But this too is a judgment which may well be questioned. In this period, as in others, there were a large number of scientists who were not, and did not want, to be free of theological considerations, and whose work in science was of a different and far more positive order than Diderot's. The supposed liberation of science from theology may have been less simple a boon than it ap- pears in the eyes of rationalism. But all these reservations might, perhaps, be summarized by pointing out that Mr Vartanian has anticipated the reviewer in suggesting that many questions raised by his book call for further special studies.

Unfortunately, it is necessary to complain of the inadequacy of the index, which is confined to names and titles and does not include all of them. And it seems a pity that the publisher should have allowed so erudite and generally well written a study to be marred by several surprising errors of grammar.

CHARLES C. GITTIspiz Princeton University

MAURICE DAUMAS: Les instruments scienti- fiques aux XVII' et XVIII' sigcles. In quarto. 417 pp., 63 pls. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953. 2,000 francs.

The publication of this very important book is the more welcome, because one had to wait a long time for it. Students whose appetite had been whetted by listening to the author's lec- tures at the Leonardo symposium in Paris, 1952,

or in Jerusalem this summer (I953) will be happy to have the book and their expectations will be generously rewarded. The history of instruments is an essential part of the history of science, whose progress is determined by practi- cal inventions as much as by theories, and by manual skill as well as by cogitations. Some in- struments (mainly astronomical) were invented and used in ancient and mediaeval times; some others were added in the sixteenth century, but the modern inventions began only in the seven- teenth, say, about i6io. From i6Io to the end of the eighteenth century the rhythm of inven- tions, improvements, and new inventions, re- mained essentially the same; a new rhythm was begun in the nineteenth and the first decades of our century, and another one about 1920. Dur- ing the period to which this book is devoted (i6Io to i8oo), the necessary and fruitful col- laboration between men of science and instru- ment makers was well established; in our own time it has become very intimate, because in- struments are often made or modified in the machine shops attached to each important lab- oratory.

The author has left out of his survey the field of gnomonics (sundials, etc.) which has been

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392 Book Reviews dealt with repeatedly by other scholars. His book is divided into three parts as follows:

Part I. The manufacture and trade of in- struments in the seventeenth century -I. The older instruments (astronomical and mathemati- Cal). 2. Inventions of the seventeenth century: telescopes, microscopes, application of optical parts to other instruments, physical instruments. 3. Shops ("ateliers") of the seventeenth century. The description of telescopes and microscopes implies a discussion of optical glass, the making and grinding of lenses. Mr Daumas has taken great pains to enumerate and describe the work- shops which existed in Italy, England, France, the Netherlands, etc. His account of the French shops is largely based on his own investigations and is full of interesting sidelights. Consider, for example, the case of Ferrier whom Descartes employed for the making of hyperbolic glasses and who created trouble between Descartes and Mydorge. Many of those seventeenth-century instrument makers were not mere artisans try- ing to satisfy the needs of men of science and to build instruments to their orders; they were true collaborators, realizing their own scientific conceptions as well as the ideas of astronomers or physicists.

Part 2. Factors modifying the evolution of the instrument trade - Economic and social factors. Technical and industrial factors. The great sci- entific problems: determination of the shape of the Earth and of longitudes at sea, electrical and chemical problems, etc. "Les cabinets de phy- sique" (collections of "philosophical" instru- ments) as illustrated in the books of Ramelli (I588), Jacques Besson (I579), Salomon de Caus (I635); as used by such men as Peiresc, Louis de Puget, Grollier de Serviere, de Thou, Mon- conys, Kircher, etc.; as represented by the col- lections preserved to this day in the science museums of Leiden, Haarlem, Paris, London, Oxford, Munich, etc.

Part 3. The instrument trade in the eight- eenth century - I. Evolution of optical instru- ments. Achromatic systems, preparation of flint, etc. 2. Evolution of astronomical and geodetic instruments. 3. The methods of dividing (grad- uating) astronomical and mathematical instru- ments (this is one of the most instructive chap- ters). 4. Evolution of physical instruments. 5. The English workshops. Opticians from John Marshall to the Dollonds, George Graham, Jesse Ramsden, etc. 6. Italian, Dutch and German workshops. 7. French workshops (this section is especially elaborate).

Mr Daumas' work is completed by a bibliog- raphy and a list of collections referred to, by an excellent index and a rich series of 137 illustra- tions. The great majority of these represent in- struments or preparatory drawings; they include a few well chosen portraits: Nicolas Bion, the Musschenbroeks, John Bird, John Dollond, Jesse Ramsden, Nicolas Fortin. It could not have been written without the abundant docu-

mentation (monuments and written accounts) provided by the great science museums of the world. Its publication is a credit not only to the author but also to the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers (Horus 265) of which he is a member and the existence of which it helps to justify. I imagine that the Conservatoire will be im- mensely grateful to Mr Daumas for having served it in such exemplary manner.

A bibliography can never hope to be complete at the time of its publication and, even if it were, it would soon cease to be so. Horus con- tains (p. 122-123) a list of books dealing with the history of instruments; that list is now es- sentially incomplete, because it does not include the best book ad hoc, the one to which this review is devoted.

GEORGE SARTON

Harvard University

LANCISI, GIOVANNI MARIA: De Aneurys- matibus. Aneurysms. The Latin text of Rome, z745. Revised with translation and notes by Wilmer Cave Wright. New York: The Mac- Millan Company, 1952. xxxv, 362 pp. $7.50.

In 1749, Johann Gottfried Zinn published his doctoral thesis concerning the function of the Corpus Callosum. To this, the great Haller ap- pended reports of cases of aortic disease, notably aneurysm. Thus, by a strange coincidence, this small volume treats of two topics closely con- nected with the work of the celebrated anato- mist, G. M. Lancisi (I654-1720), physician to three Popes and the greatest Italian clinician of the early i8th century. Zinn's thesis is one of the first attempts at an experimental localisation of brain functions. It is brilliant, original and transcends by a wide margin the scope of doc- toral dissertations of all times. Lancisi's theory of the Corpus Callosum as the "seat of the soul" is here refuted on experimental and argumenta- tive grounds. By contrast, Haller's paper is a poor specimen - especially when compared with Lancisi's magnificent work on the same subject. This has been edited, translated and annotated in the book under review, which forms a com- panion to Ramazzini and Fracastoro edited in the same way by the same author some years ago. The edition goes far to satisfy what could possibly be demanded from a scholarly, pains- taking and, at the same time, readable and in- structive rendering. The greatness of the man and his work is brought out well, especially where, for the first time, in a systematic man- ner, syphilis is introduced as a common cause of aneurysm. (Proposition 32 and seq.). Lancisi, who emphasizes trauma as a general factor pre- disposing to aneurysm, suggests that the syphi- litic damage attacks the aorta from outside, notably from sinews, nerves and even vertebrae; the frequent exertions of the latter in coitus had, he thought at least in one case, the effect of

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