686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE pendence on the mother country, to the establishment of an inde pendent scientific culture. MacLeod is also critical of the model that distinguishes the central “metropolitan” science from the peripheral “colonial” science. But the interpretative pattern he suggests, with five successive phases of development, although more complicated, is not completely free from the criticisms made against the other models. At the end of this selection, therefore, the reader is left with some large unanswered questions about the nature of colonialism and the subtle relationship between scientific investigation and the political and cultural ethos of the colonial mentality. As far as Australia is concerned, as it now commemorates 200 years of intimate ties with Britain, this involves penetrating the rhetoric of colonial exploitation and the “cultural cringe” to understand how the country has made a genuinely independent contribution to the scientific experience of the world community. This task remains to be done. R. A. Buchanan Dr. Buchanan is director of the Centre for the History of Technology, Science and Society at the University of Bath and Secretary-General of ICOHTEC. From Maxwell to Microphysics: Aspects ofElectromagnetic Theory in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century. By Jed Z. Buchwald. Chicago: Uni versity of Chicago Press, 1985. Pp. xv + 339; figures, appendixes, bibliography, indexes. $70.00. This formidable book is an internalist study of Maxwellian electro dynamics in the 1880s and 1890s. Its prime purposes are to explain British methods in electromagnetic theory and to begin to understand European adaptations to field theory at the end of the 19th century. Its focus is on the transfer and development of Maxwellian ideas, stressing continuum mechanics and a hypothetical ether, into elec tronic field theory, emphasizing the structure of particles and fields at all levels. Its scope is strictly limited, as indicated by the subtitle, and its presentation is highly technical, as indicated by the price. Jed Buchwald restricts himself to understanding the physics first by con verting all the mathematical notations into modern standardized form. Better historical understanding must necessarily await more such tech nical monographs. Like many translators of poetry, Buchwald con fesses the impossibility of adequately translating into modern idiom what he terms the “Maxwelsh” language of only 100 years ago. Yet he proceeds to try, and he succeeds very well, in my view. Buchwald rules out of consideration “the intricate and difficult problem of in commensurability” (p. xi), and he pleads for “patience and indul gence” (p. 4) from the reader at the outset. Much of both virtues is TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 687 required, but the rewards are worth the effort. This is a pathbreaking book for both the history of electrical science and technology. James Clerk Maxwell died prematurely in 1879, but his influence lived on, especially in English-reading countries, as the Maxwellian synthesis of knowledge about light, electricity, and magnetism took hold of the imaginations of the cognoscenti. Buchwald gives a table of thirty-three Maxwellians (p. 74) that lists the corps of primary dis ciples. Perhaps the most famous of these apostles were J. H. Poynting, J. J. Thomson, G. F. FitzGerald, R. T. Glazebrook, Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, and Joseph Larmor. A few Americans too were im portant: Buchwald devotes one chapter to H. A. Rowland and three sections to Edwin Hall and the implications of the Hall Effect. Perhaps significantly, the Edison Effect is not so honored. Yet magneto-optics and the Leiden school (Lorentz and the Zeeman Effect) get subsumed in the macro-versus-microphysics synthesis that Buchwald describes as a two-phase process. Perhaps here is the most valuable contribution of this study. Buch wald clarifies the seemingly slight but actually profound transfor mation, which he calls the “abandoning,” of Maxwellian theory, that occurred between 1894 and 1897. Thanks to the theoretical work of Larmor, Lorentz, Poincare, and J. J. Thomson, as well as the dramatic discoveries of X-rays, radioactivity, and the e/m ratio within cathode rays, Buchwald argues that the transition to microphysics was virtually complete by 1900. I disagree. Tell that to Hertz or Lodge or Marconi, and what would ensue? Buchwald deliberately ignores the obscurantist, out-of-date, and...