Les nouvelles pensées de Galilée, mathématicien et ingenieure du Duc de Florence by MarinMersenneReview by: Stillman DrakeIsis, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 135-136Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/229562 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 66 *1 * 231 (1975) 135

A full, comprehensive biography, a true historical synthesis of the many known details, and a really accurate assessment of van Swieten's importance-things which have eluded us-may be possible in the future. Perhaps by the year 2000, when it comes time to celebrate the anniversary of his birth, we will have not only another symposium and another series of papers, but a definitive evaluation of van Swieten's place in European history.

FRANK T. BRECHKA Department of History

University of California Berkeley, California 94720

Marin Mersenne. Les nouvelles pensies de Galilee, mathInmaticien et ingenieure du Duc de Florence. Edition critique avec introduc- tion et notes par Pierre Costabel et Michel-Pierre Lerner. Avant-propos de Bernard Rochot. (L'Histoire des Sciences: Textes et Etudes.) Volume 1: 130 pp. Vol- ume II (notes et index): pp. 131-318. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1973.

Within three months after publication at Leiden of Galileo's Two New Sciences, in mixed Italian and Latin, a summary of its contents in French was anonymously printed at Paris. This was the work of Marin Mersenne, whose speed in producing it was partly the result of his having examined a manuscript of Galileo's book in 1637. First printed in October 1638, the Nouvelles pensees was placed on public sale early in 1639 by a different publisher, who added a dedication designed to protect a book setting forth the ideas of a condemned author. Copies of the first printing appear to have been sent to learned friends of Mersenne, and its reissue was probably intended as a popularizing vehicle of the new science in France.

The modern critical edition just pub- lished is of great importance, not only because the text is rare, but because an introduction and notes have been provided that illuminate the relation of Mersenne's scientific work to Galileo's, the place of many contemporaries with respect to them, and the hitherto-neglected bibliographical aspects of the book. The foreword by Bernard Rochot was written shortly before

his untimely death, making it unfortunately the last of his published contributions to our field.

Even the physical design of the volumes offers some valuable innovations that can help keep scholarly publication alive in these days of monstrous publishing costs. The now customary removal of notes to the back of a book, invented by lazy printers and stingy publishers, has been turned from a necessity into a virtue by their placement in a second volume so that they may be consulted alongside the text. Four pages of original text are printed on a single page, requiring smaller type but adequately serving the basic purpose of a critical edi- tion.

It would be impossible in a review of ordinary length to discuss this book in anything like the detail necessary to do the subject justice. Assuming that everyone working in the era that closed with the work of Galileo and Mersenne and opened with that of Cartesian physics will buy a copy, I shall offer only some cautionary remarks. These are certainly intended not in a spirit of adverse criticism but for their potential value to nonspecialists.

The treatment accorded to Mersenne is on the whole rather less sympathetic, both as to motives and achievements, than war- ranted. Suggestions that Mersenne wished undue credit in France for novel ideas may be dismissed, considering that his name did not appear on the title page, while Galileo's was prominently displayed. The editors argue frequently for Mersenne's in- comprehension or confusion of Galileo's thought, though a simpler explanation is sometimes available-the ordinary hazards of abridgment and simplification in a popularizing work. Mersenne's conception of the roles of experiment and mathematics certainly differed from Galileo's, but it is doubtful that an intelligent reader of the period would not have distinguished the reporting from the critical comments by Mersenne.

The editors took pains in the extensive notes to supply necessary contexts in Gali- leo's book from which Mersenne's extracts were taken; this enables the reader to perceive some essential things lost in the Nouvelles pensies by elimination of the dia- logue form. They also provide excerpts

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136 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 66 * 1 * 231 (1975)

from Mersenne's other books referred to in the Nouvelles pensees. Thus the book now appears for the first time in a form of maximum comprehensibility. Yet it is evi- dent that the editors' own understanding of some parts of Galileo's thought rests on interpretations that have been recently questioned and should no longer be as- sumed uncritically. Admittedly, the purpose of this book is not that of estab- lishing Galileo's views, but this element necessarily enters into its task of critically estimating Mersenne's understanding of them. Instances occur in which Mersenne may have grasped Galileo's thought better than his modern critics, and others in which Mersenne's mistaken impressions are ac- cepted as correct by the editors.

For example, Mersenne was clearly aware of the differences between experiments that would have been necessary to support Galileo's comparison in the Dialogue be- tween free fall and motion along inclined planes and the experiments along inclined planes alone that he described in the Two New Sciences. This difference is not recog- nized in the Remarque d'ensemble on page 254. Again, Mersenne's understandable misconception of Galileo's intent in the 'semicircular fall" passage of the Dialogue is ignored in the remarque on pages 284- 286. In the same critique Cavalieri's pub- lication of the parabolic trajectory in 1632 is omitted from the discussion of Mer- senne's reference to others.

Although readers should be cautious in such regards, mines of further research are opened by this book. An example is the neglected dispute between Gassendi, Cazre, Fabri, and Le Tenneur mentioned on page 47. Fabri offered in 1646 an ingenious reconciliation of Galileo's exper- imental results with classical impetus theory, in which acceleration in free fall was treated as a series of quantum jumps of uniform speeds. He did not attack Gali- leo (as did Cazre), but claimed that impetus physics was superior to Galileo's concept of continuous acceleration because it af- forded a causal explanation, hidden from Galileo, while implying the same macro- scopic observation results. A note records that Fabri's book was not available to the editors, but study of this dispute promises still more light on Galileo and Mersenne,

while it will also clear up some current misapprehensions about impetus theory in Aristotelian physics.

It was Descartes who revolutionized physics by creating the mechanical philoso- phy, which was far from the mind of Galileo, or from that of Mersenne in 1639. All the essential ingredients of physics seen as the mathematical analysis of actually observable phenomena were present in the combined works of Galileo and Mersenne before Descartes put an end to that abortive scientific revolution. Whichever side one takes today, the Nouvelles pensies represent- ed the first published collaboration between two exponents of a new science, one tem- peramentally biased toward mathematics and the other toward experiment. If the collaborative element was necessarily one- sided and in the nature of a commentary, this book nevertheless remains a unique monument to the best of pre-Cartesian physics.

STILLMAN DRAKE Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Arnold Thackray. John Dalton. Critical As- sessments of His Life and Science. (Harvard Monographs in the History of Science.) xv + 190 pp., 9 plts., bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. $11.50.

This volume consists of seven essays containing documents and critical com- ment. The essays are based in part, some- times substantially, on Arnold Thackray's earlier writings. The work however has the merit of bringing together Thackray's val- uable additions to the Dalton corpus and of displaying the broader historiographical issues in the field. The explicit presentation of these issues is salutary, particularly where they concern the reciprocal relations between science and the Industrial Revolu- tion in Britain. Thackray is here more concerned to identify the issues than to suggest how Dalton's career might serve to clarify and help to resolve them, so that the volume is essentially programmatic and

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