Heidi C. M. Scott. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2014. Pp. 224. $64.95. Chaos and Cosmos is an authoritative, truly interdisciplinary book that turns the usual impulse of Romantic studies on its head: instead of sketching out a literary ecocriticism, to paraphrase Jonathan Bate's famous phrase, Scott ambitiously sets out to find the origins of contemporary ecological methods in Romantic and Victorian literature. Each of the structures of thought of the book's title is connected both to a nineteenth-century literary genre, and to a practice or principle in the work of modern ecological scientists. Chaos refers both to the formal features of nonlinear prose narrative in Romantic and Victorian speculative fictions by Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies, and H. G. Wells, and also to the unpredictable and cataclysmic environmental phenomena of our contemporary natural world--which Scott argues would be more accurately charted through narrative ecological modeling. Cosmos, by contrast, is related to a Romantic notion of the mind as natural microcosm in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, and to the experimental model of microcosm that modern ecologists continue to use to study nature's activities in a balanced, controlled form--a scientific procedure that, Scott contends, is inherited from lyrical poetic practices familiar to readers of Wordsworth and Keats. Prose and poetry; cataclysm and balance; Scott brings together these bald dichotomies under the banners of chaos and cosmos to make an argument about the practice of ecological science today, in relation both to its poetic inheritance and its potential narrative future. While these are no doubt heterogeneous ideas yoked together forcefully, nature and art prove to be connected by more than comparison and allusion. Scott argues that the disciplines of contemporary ecology and Romantic literature (and, by implicit extension, literary studies) are mutually discursive: The seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosm at the formal, empirical level was sown by poets of the nineteenth century who consciously drew a sphere around small-scale nature in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the increasingly chaotic global, industrial modern world (4). With readings of both Romantic and Victorian texts, the book addresses itself to literary scholars, but as inset chapters on Scientific Nonfiction and Today's Scientific Modeling reveal, Scott also intends to reach ecologists an ambition confirmed by her ultimate objective to extrapolate literary methods into ecological science, both by acknowledging the indebtedness of post-Darwinian ecology to poetic microcosm, and by revealing the usefulness of narrative in charting the progress of environmental unpredictability. real goal of the book to extend outside of literary studies can sometimes mean that its tone becomes unevenly empiricist (155)> as Scott strives to make studying the nineteenth century relevant to her implied ecologist reader. A reading of George Eliot's lyric poetry is interrupted by an invective on Disney's Imagineering (137); the final section of the book, a Case Study of Keats, is introduced with the sentence, Detailed data collected from this exemplary poet reveal underlying principles that apply more generally (155). This possibly estranging language is an unavoidable and minor consequence of Scott's admirable cross-disciplinary fluency, and her book's argument will have the reach beyond Romanticism to be both impactful and sustainable in ecological studies. There is no question that this book will impact both Romanticism and literary ecocriticism more generally. Scott's first two chapters, which address anticipations of today's climate change in Romantic and Victorian prose, are wonderfully original. …