192 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the abundance of case examples the study provides, one comes away with the sense that Pyenson has only begun to identify patterns, to make connections with larger questions in the history of science, or even to sort out the meanings of all the data he has uncovered. The book contains a virtual prosopography of French colonial scientists, but Pyenson makes no attempt to discern persistent career trajectories or draw conclusions about the impact of colonial assignments on them. He includes an impressive range of case studies, but in the absence of explicit and systematic comparison one is left wondering what all the accounts of frustrated projects and bureaucratic infight ing contribute to our understanding of the links between colonialism and science. He makes no attempt to distinguish analytically between formal and informal colonies or, for that matter, between colonies and fully independent nations in the Americas. He provides only the sketchiest details about the broader colonial contexts, thus isolating scientific enterprise from the administrative, military, economic, and social imperatives that vitally shaped it in France overseas. As in Pyenson’s earlier work, the colonized peoples are at best mar ginal in Civilizing Mission, a significant omission in a work so titled. This is especially problematic because one of his central arguments is that scientists and scientific institutions were key agents of Frenchlanguage cultural imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Without considerable evidence of indigenous responses, it is not pos sible to know this, or to know just what the “natives” made of the observatories and experiment stations. On this and other vital issues, Civilizing Mission has little to tell us. Like so many of the colonial scientists Pyenson studies, it provides useful data, but leaves the analy sis of this information and its meaning for ongoing debates in the history of science and European colonialism to be worked out by other scholars. Michael Adas Dr. Adas is the author of Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism. By Michael A. Osborne. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pp- xvi + 216; illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $35.00. We have all been fascinated by our first visit to the zoo. The display of exotic creatures in northern latitudes goes back a long way. The menageries and Jardin du roi, for example, appeared at the French court when Europeans were discovering the natural world beyond Europe. Zoological and botanical gardens may even be said to provide standards for defining the exotic. Less obvious is the historical link between such institutions and imperialism. In this work, Michael Os TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 193 borne identifiesjust this link in the “essential science ofcolonization— acclimatization” (p. xiv). His focus is the history of a French scientific institution, the Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, and his emphasis is on the acclimatizers’ utilitarian goals rather than their dispassionate interests. Osborne seeks to evaluate how Second Empire colonization af fected French science and technology (particularly zoology and agri culture) and how metropolitan zoologists took part in France’s expan sionist enterprise. The first two chapters take the society from its foundation under the enthusiastic leadership of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire up to 1920. Osborne demonstrates that the acclimatiz ers’ ideas about colonization and agricultural development closely mirrored those of the imperial regime. The society, understood by the author as an “epistemic community,” relied on a well-defined scientific ideology—a variant of Lamarckian transformism. The soci ety’s work had clear implications for French colonialist policies. In the acclimatizers’ view, one set of principles governed the raising of ostriches in France and Europeans in Algeria. The fourth chapter is the most interesting, describing the early success the society achieved from a concrete and spectacular develop ment: the Paris Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, a splendid zoo con structed in 1860 through imperial patronage. More than a public attraction, it became a center of exotic animal trading. A private cor poration took on the task of promoting the economic utility of applied zoology. Unusual creatures arrived from all continents, and...