Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England by Nicholas Russell

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 293 technology (the community of experimenters) that legitimized their production and authenticated them. In other words, these were the matter, form, and power of the commonwealth ofexperimental science. Readers of Technology and Culture will find the account of the pro­ duction and operation of the air pump itself of most interest. Shapin and Schaffer describe in great detail the design, operation, and dis­ semination of pumps in the 1660s when the critical experiments were carried out. They evince some remarkable facts: there were few pumps in this period (no one managed to build one without having seen one); and still fewer could be made to work (it seems Robert Hooke and Christian Huygens were their only reliable operators). It was not until the 1670s that men like Denis Papin and the Paris clockmaker Gaudron were able to make air pumps reliable and on order. It was for these reasons that the technology of the pump itself had to be bolstered by the literary and social technologies that legitimated its products and its use. Experimental facts were machine-made and they were not easily reproducible. To gain assent and exercise authority, they re­ quired the sanction of something like a Royal Society. This was pre­ cisely the point of Thomas Hobbes, who understood such things. Experiments for him could never supply the foundation of a natural philosophy; they were the artificial and unreliable products of an ex­ clusive guild. Shapin and Schaffer work out the implications of these debates for the history of science with great skill of interpretation and exposition. They use their findings and their analysis to give an explanation of the experimental enterprise in general, which, although it is not phil­ osophical in nature, always takes philosophy most seriously. This is simply one of the most original, enjoyable, and important books pub­ lished in the history of science in recent years. Owen Hannaway Dr. Hannaway is professor and chairman of the History of Science Department at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently working on the influence of Renaissance Humanism on the history of science and technology and on the relationship between technical practice and theoretical knowledge in the early modern period. Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modem England. By Nicholas Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 271; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $42.50. Like many innovators, biotechnologists are inclined to emphasize the originality and freshness of their ideas, a habit that often involves a corollary reticence about roots and sources. Thus genetic engineers seldom acknowledge the relationship between their enterprise and the plant and animal breeding practiced by uncountable generations 294 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of agriculturists. (This constructed distinction has now been legally sanctified by the Supreme Court; it is possible to patent life forms produced in the laboratory, but not those produced on the farm.) Such attempts at self-creation are not simply the result of modern scientific arrogance. The historiography of conventional breeding in­ cludes parallel denials. For example, the traditional account of animal husbandry in the agricultural revolution acknowledges no ancestors for the methods of breeding and management that produced cattle and sheep varieties of breathtaking magnificence. This account was originally promulgated by the great 18th-century improvers them­ selves and their admirers, and it has been widely disseminated by subsequent historians. Recent scholarship has, however, blurred the once-clear distinction between the enlightened farming of the agricultural revolution and the benighted practices of earlier periods. In his thoughtful and wellresearched study, Like Engend’ring Like, Nicholas Russell effectively continues this work ofcontextualization. Its very structure emphasizes continuity and implicitly disparages the notion of saltatory change. Several introductory chapters place his analysis of breeding technol­ ogy in the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries in relation not only to the contemporary market for animals and animal products but also to the classical theories of heredity and development that determined, however fuzzily and indirectly, early modern ideas on the subject. The sheep and cattle that roamed Tudor hillsides and meadows emerge as the intellectual, if not the physical, heirs of the animals observed by Aristotle, Columella, and Varro. The chapters...