Reviewed by: The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870 Klaus Hentschel Jutta Schickore. The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ix + 317 pp. Ill. $40.00, £22.00 (ISBN-10: 0-226-73784-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73784-3). Not merely another history of microscopy, this book focuses on the interplay of microscopic practice and methodology. Such seventeenth- and early-eighteenthcentury pioneers as Hooke and Leeuwenhoek initiated it as a Baconian enterprise with new instruments to enhance the powers of the eye so as to gain novel and apparently boundless insights into the microstructure of objects. In the period under study, however, the actors learned the hard way about the limits of this endeavor. Alexander Munro, for instance, was puzzled about what was apparently the same microstructure reappearing in a wide variety of examined objects, ranging from spiders’ legs to lilacs, molten wax, and tallow (see p. 43). Since it was implausible that all these materials actually shared the same fiber structure, he suspected an instrumental artifact. He decided to consult a local expert. John Robison, professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh, helped him confirm this suspicion. It was a prudent caution to all researchers to not overinterpret superficial features and to take conditions of illumination, aperture, maximum resolution, and so on, properly into account. This process repeated itself when Abbé Felice Fontana found disturbingly drastic differences in appearance of nerve fibers through different microscopes. Under low magnification, they looked like spiral bands wound around a cylinder, whereas under high magnification, they seemed to consist of wavy winding fibers (p. 51). What was their “real” structure? What were the optimal conditions of observation? Which dyes were best for preparing the samples without altering their structures? Findings such as these prompted researchers in microscopy to turn their attention to what Jutta Schickore calls “reflexive” or “second-order” issues (p. 3). They include procedures for testing the proper operation of the instruments used. [End Page 401] Not the scientific samples but the instruments became the object of study. One important strand was the search for natural test specimens such as insect wings or diatoms or the manufacture of such artificial trial objects as F. A. Nobert’s famous test-bands, gratings produced with a specially designed ruling engine (see p. 112 ff). Low-power microscopy also became a “second-order tool” for precise readings of scale values in various other scientific practices—consult chapter 3 for a few examples from meteorology (barometers), astronomy (graded circles), and physics (pyrometers). In the nineteenth century, these concerns did not disappear. They were, rather, exacerbated. Schickore compares the approaches in Britain with the ones used by the Germans. David Brewster, Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, and others intensely analyzed “microscopical fallacies, peculiar optical deceptions and the eye’s defects” (ch. 4). In the German lands, on the contrary, the emphasis was much less on physical optics than on physiological optics and anatomy. One case study—in my opinion the weakest and least suited to the volume— deals with the towering figure Johannes Müller and the shifting balance between German natural philosophy and experimental exactitude in his practice (ch. 6). Another focus is the efforts by the anatomist and physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber “to bring physics to anatomy” (ch. 7). The anatomy and microstructure of nerve tissue and the retina also take center stage in the author’s further analyses on controversies among Christian Ehrenberg, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann, C. F. G. T. Krause, G. R. Treviranus, and Jakob Henle, the first to suggest a layering of the retina recognizably close to future textbook accounts (p. 205). This densely written book ends with a less satisfactory whirlwind tour through the new genre of instruction manuals and a summary chapter on “the advance of reflexive concerns,” which marks the main and quite original goal of this work. All readers interested in this “turn to the tools” (p. 248) will find this account very profitable. Those interested in other—in my view, equally important—aspects, such as issues of discipline formation or the use of research technologies, will find it less so. Klaus Hentschel...
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