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but a fact; it is a context that needs to be consid-ered if the book is to be adopted by Universityteachers.

Richard Huggett has been a prolific writerof undergraduate texts in physical geography;others include introductions to geomorphology,geo-ecology (whatever that is!), environmentalchange and, most recently, topography and theenvironment. All are written clearly, structuredlogically and well illustrated.

Fundamentals ofBiogeography

(2nd edition) is no exception andis peppered with interesting case studies, photo-graphs, diagrams, boxes elaborating on particu-lar concepts, chapter summaries, suggestions forfurther reading and even examples of possibleessay questions. He could hardly have madethis more accessible and attractive for anyoneteaching an introductory course in biogeogra-phy! Whether it is actually adopted, however, isless certain, and depends on how individual lec-turers construct their curriculum – for, as IanSimmons once pointed out, many adopt a ‘shop-ping trolley’ approach to the discipline and pickout particular concepts and packages of contentthat may not necessarily be adequately coveredin an elementary text of this type. Nevertheless,this book has gone to a second edition, a factthat indeed suggests he was successful in gettingthe mix right first time around.

There has been considerable restructuring.Whereas the first edition had only eight chap-ters, this now has 18 divided into four parts. In‘Introducing Biogeography’, Huggett grappleswith the definitional issues and then outlinesfundamental distributional processes that under-lie biogeographical patterns, including evolutionand dispersal. Part II, ‘Ecological Biogeogra-phy’, is the bulk of the book and is really anupdated version of what constituted much of thefocus of the first edition. Thus, we have an intro-duction to the main ecological concepts of hab-itat, niche, a consideration of how the physicalenvironment interacts with organisms, and sev-eral chapters devoted to basic ecological (ratherthan biogeographical) principles such as popula-tions and communities. Part III is more overtlybiogeographical (and largely new) in dealingwith changing patterns and processes over time.Vicariance is neatly, if rather simplistically,dealt with through a series of examples thatfocus on continental drift. The final part, ‘Con-servation Biogeography’, has an applied focusand is refreshingly different from its equivalentchapter in the first edition, which was largelyphilosophical in nature. Here we are introduced

to the principles of conservation biology andefforts to maintain biodiversity through systemsof reserves.

The author has been moderately successful inhis attempts to bring the material up to date.Approximately 120 of the 700-odd referenceswere published subsequent to the first editionand certainly there are recent case studies todraw on. In general I think this edition is a sub-stantial improvement and it should prove to beat least as successful as its predecessor. Nodoubt this means it will be widely adopted as anintroductory text in British University depart-ments of Geography. Huggett has gone to con-siderable lengths to ensure his case studies aredrawn from a wide range of geographical con-texts and this may possibly attract the market’sattention from elsewhere too.

M. Meadows

University of Cape TownSouth Africa

Putting Science in its Place: Geographies ofScientific Knowledge

David N. Livingstone, University of ChicagoPress, Chicago and London, 2003, xii + 243 pp,ISBN 0 226 48722 9 (hardback) US$27.50.

This is a striking, fascinating and unusual book.Part history of science (or history of ideas) andpart philosophy, it includes information on anincredible range of topics: cartography andcathedrals, lunatic asylums, Linnaeus and Lamarck,operating theatres and occultism among them.This enormous diversity of material, has, how-ever, been carefully organised and structuredwith the aim of demonstrating that there is ageography of science; that place and spacematter when one is discussing scientific enquiry.Science is often portrayed as objective; the lawsof nature, it is sometimes argued, are the sameeverywhere in the world (and beyond it). Theauthor argues that there is no ‘single, unifiedscientific rationality’. As he puts it in his lastchapter: ‘What has been promoted as scientificobjectivity, as the “view from nowhere” turns outto have been a “view from somewhere”. Therecognition that rationality is not disembodiedbut positioned has significant implications …’

Chapter 1 makes the initial plea for a geogra-phy of science. This is partly done through aseries of case studies. The author compares thereception of Darwinian ideas in New Zealand

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with the American South. Auckland ‘heard thepraises of Darwin’s theory of evolution sung longand loud’. There Darwin’s ideas conclusivelydemonstrated how a ‘weak and ill-furnishedrace’ had to give way in the face of a strongerone. In Charleston, however, the same ideaswere resisted as they threatened the belief of theseparate creation of different races, endowedby different capacities. Sometimes scientific andcultural ideas became intermixed. ‘The emer-gence of “the Orient” as a geographical region… was largely a product of science zealouslyprosecuted during and after the Europeanenlightenment’, it is noted. Anthropologists,cartographers, engineers, geologists and survey-ors contributed to the idea that the MiddleEast was an exotic, mysterious and differentenvironment.

Chapter 2 considers ‘Site: the venues ofscience’. Where is science ‘done’? Livingstoneconsiders the laboratory, the museum, the field,the garden (botanical and zoological), the hospi-tal, the human body and even the tent and thecoffee house as settings for scientific endeavour.The locality can influence the ‘product’ and viceversa. Botanic gardens such as those at Kewcould be seen as a node, receiving vegetableproducts and information about their possibleuse from throughout the world, and re-exportingthem to destinations throughout the BritishEmpire.

In the third chapter the scale changes; in‘Region: cultures of science’ an attempt is madeto identify, and explain, distinctive regional cul-tures of science. The courtly, church-dominatedculture of seventeenth century Italy is contrastedwith the maritime outlook of centres in Iberia,and the questioning to be found in ProtestantEngland, where interrogating nature, it wasthought, might purge Christianity of Catholicsuperstition: thus arose the distinctly Englishdoctrine of natural theology. The sub-regionallevel is also considered. For example, a distinc-tive Victorian ‘Manchester science’ is identified,connected to municipal politics and the rise ofmercantilism and manufacturing.

Chapter 4 is headed ‘Circulation: movementsof science’. Scientific equipment, data, speci-mens and theories move across the surface ofthe earth, just as do the other entities in whichgeographers are interested. Cartography, andlater photography, are naturally enough, consid-ered as vehicles for the movement of scientificinformation and ideas. Eighteenth and nine-teenth century explorers sometimes reorganised

the world in Europe’s image; Captain JamesCook and George Vancouver in their chartingused the names of political figures and sometimes,naturalists. The names used by indigenous peo-ple were effaced. Sometimes even the existenceof such peoples was hardly mentioned. Thecharacteristics of the collectors of informationare also discussed in detail in this chapter. Atheme that appears here, and elsewhere in thebook, is that traditionally some types of personshave been considered more reliable and ‘trust-worthy’ than others to bring in and processinformation. Explorers who had undergone greatprivations (and could display their wounds)were sometimes considered especially reliable,whereas, until relatively recently, women wereconsidered inferior observers to men. Darwinin

The Descent of Man

(1871) asserted ‘man ismore powerful in body and mind than woman’.His ‘bulldog’, Thomas Huxley went as far tostate, was that most women ‘stop at the dollstage of evolution’! The Royal Society did notopen its doors to females until 1945, the Frenchequivalent not until 1979. Women who achievedrecognition were sometimes credited with mas-culine attributes.

The final, quite short chapter returns to thetitle of the book, ‘Putting science in its place’,summarising the main approaches: site; regionand culture; transfer and transformation. Theauthor concludes: ‘. . . attending to the spaces ofscience is of no small significance in coming togrips with the character of scientific endeavor,and therefore of the modern world itself.’

The book, which has a small, handy-sizedformat, is excellently produced. It is well-written.A convenient one-paragraph summary comes atthe end of each chapter. There are remarkablyfew typographic and other errors. There areover thirty varied and interesting illustrations(although the reproduction of these could havebeen improved). However, instead of referencesbeing given throughout the body of the work,they are confined to a ‘Bibliographical Essay’ atits end. This makes the main text easier to read,but it may annoy those who like to see sourcesmentioned in context, with the full apparatus ofsuperscripts, footnotes or endnotes. Some mightadd the observation that relatively few archivalsources are used. But these are minor cavils.David Livingstone has produced an interestingbook that breaks new ground.

Patrick Armstrong

University of Western Australia