Levine and Novoa set out to challenge two kinds of historian. They invite historians of ideas to extend their focus beyond positivism in accounting for developments in nineteenth-century Argentine intellectual life and they prompt historians of science to look beyond Europe in explaining developments in evolutionary theory. Their volume of translated and annotated extracts from eight Argentine scientists and intellectuals goes a long way towards fulfilling both aims, particularly the former. It is an impressive feat of translation, drawing upon French, German and Italian as well as Spanish sources. It also includes two fine chapters of intellectual history, in which the authors develop an effective argument to explain why Darwin's ideas had lasting ramifications in Argentina: his decorously drawn picture of nature as a combat zone swept aside the vision of universal progress upon which the Argentine project of nation-building had initially been based. After independence, nation-builders of varied political views had tended to share a conception of the natural world as holistic, citing Alexander von Humboldt's benign scientific model of ecological harmony as confirmation of older imaginings of a providential nature that promised a utopian future. They argued about how, and how much, humankind should intervene to secure the anticipated outcome, but, despite the acute social and political divisions of the next three decades, they mostly continued to assume that progress was in the natural order of things. Darwin's claim that evolution could equally well bring about atavism or extinction, i.e. that not all change was necessarily a movement in the right direction, undermined all such optimism. Yet it was only a minority of Argentine intellectuals who rejected his ideas outright. Many of them were critical of his relentless empiricism, his lack of a unifying historical narrative or his unadorned style. Even so, Darwinism, or at least modified versions of it, blended with the thought of Haeckel or Spencer, both of whom made it easier to restore a moral vision of human development, was embraced by most Argentine intellectuals, both scientific and literary. It was even championed by the very Liberals, Sarmiento and Avellaneda, whose project of modernisation it radically challenged. Moreover, by the 1890s the fact of Darwin's presence in Argentina during the 1830s had become central to dominant narratives of the country's place in the world as a chosen ‘repository of evolutionary evidence […] and a laboratory for ongoing evolutionary processes’ (p. 25).

The extracts are all fascinating and revealing, and the commentaries provided are finely judged to give the reader just enough background to approach them with confidence but without too many preconceptions. The selection starts with a piece from 1845 by the pioneering palaeontologist, Francisco Javier Muñiz (1795–1871), who corresponded with and helped Darwin. There are then five chapters covering the 1870s and 1880s (organised by author: Hermann Burmeister; Francisco P. Moreno, Domingo Sarmiento, Eduardo Holmberg and Florentino Ameghino), with a final two on the early twentieth century (José Ingenieros and Carlos Octavio Bunge). The main criterion for inclusion, namely introduction of ‘a characteristic original theme’ (p. xvi), seems a little arbitrary. The five themes are all drawn from evolutionary thought (pre-Darwinian ideas of nature; Darwin in relation to the Enlightenment, extinction, sexual selection, evolutionary psychology), rather than from Argentine intellectual history. It would have been more in keeping with the anti-Eurocentric spirit of the book at least to indicate what the themes might have been had the latter perspective been adopted. Even within the framework chosen it is hard to justify the exclusion of José María Ramos Mejía, who represented rather more than ‘the influence of Darwinism in medicine’ (p. xvi), particularly in his widely-read, ‘Darwin-inspired treatise’ on the mental disorders of famous figures in Argentine history (p. 21). There are moments when the interpretation offered in the opening chapters seems to be challenged by evidence in the extracts: for example, the authors claim that ‘European science was much less stable and secure than Argentine intellectuals realized’ (p. 16), but several of the texts discuss debates and controversies in Europe. In any case, several of the scientists included were well-travelled and well-known themselves in international scientific networks. What is the case, and what the selected extracts bring out well, is that, unsurprisingly, Argentine intellectuals had little interest in differentiating the debates along the lines that were meaningful in Europe. Instead, they practised a ‘synthetic creativity’ (p. 29), which cut across the boundaries of national scientific traditions in Europe and which, in so doing, now offers historians of European intellectual developments a new and illuminating perspective. There is some particularly interesting material on the Argentine Catholic responses to Darwin's ideas, which were not primarily focused on the conflict between Darwinism and creationism, the prominent feature of Protestant opposition in the United States, but rather with the immediately pressing question of how to secure progress if the principle of natural selection trumped rational human agency. Levine and Novoa's analysis of how some Argentine intellectuals drew upon positivism to address such concerns is compelling and contributes to our understanding of why it mattered in Argentina.

I have two minor criticisms. First, there is a tendency to elide Argentina with other Latin America countries and, although it is a change to see Argentina occupy the slot of regional paradigm instead of Mexico, it is no improvement. From their previous work, it is evident that Levine and Novoa are in a position to know when precise comparisons can be made with the histories of other Latin American countries and I would have liked to see them do so more often here. Second, outstanding translators as they are, these two authors have not fully made the transition in their own chapters from writing for historians of science to writing for a general audience (I doubt I will be the only reader who has to look up ‘orthogenesis’ or ‘uniformitarian geology’ and a glossary of such terms would have been helpful). Overall, though, this is a fine book, produced with great care and thought, which provides an invaluable resource for teaching both history of Argentina and history of science. Moreover, the quality of the intellectual history in Levine and Novoa's chapters make this book worthy of an audience beyond the history of science series in which it has been published. Anyone interested in Darwinism or in general Argentine history should read it.