This book continues a welcome trend in recent instrument historiography: away from narrow technical teleologies and celebrations of great men, towards a nuanced and period-specific understanding of the manifold uses of instruments, the rhetoric of their advocates and the marketing strategies of their makers. Specifically, eighteenth-century microscopy is becoming fashionable again. Following on from Jutta Schickore's excellent The Microscope and the Eye (2007), Ratcliff offers a convincing rehabilitation of the period, with fine case studies on Louis Joblot, Abraham Trembley's polyp researches and the marketing strategies of Henry Baker.

Ratcliff's scope is fully international, taking in the French, Italian, German and English instrument trades and related research programmes. At times this leads to overambition and lends the book a saltational quality, but in general I would agree with the opening statement that ‘studying local or national history for historical scientific information while in fact everything was based on much more far-reaching networks is a geographical anachronism’ (p. 5). This, however, is just about the only theoretical meditation in the book with which I would concur – rarely has so much good research been bracketed by such inappropriate extrapolation.

Alarm bells start ringing on page one, where Ratcliff writes,

The convolution of this passage is indicative of the style of Ratcliff's introduction and conclusion (though not, tellingly, of the bulk of historical material presented in between). He offers, in effect, a genealogy of the means of reaching consensus on the nature of an instrumental observation, yet the genealogist's chief insights are typically into the construction of categories and their coming into being from the most varied of sources, the archetype here being, of course, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1986), which also deals with consensus and instruments. The one thing that Leviathan expressly did not do, however, was presuppose ‘scientific’ validity for one method of reaching consensus; rather it showed precisely how one method amongst many came to be seen as scientific.

Dotted throughout Ratcliff's introduction and conclusion are statements of the following sort:

And: ‘In fact, “doing science” implied, in the eighteenth century, that scholars dealt with both communication and cognition. A heuristic way to build a stable research domain was to tackle communication as a scientific problem’ (p. 252). Now, not only do these clearly beg the question, but they are also presented, extraordinarily, as improvements on previous Whiggish interpretations of the history of microscopy. True enough, for a long time instrument historians did not treat the eighteenth century very well. At least for England, microscopes were cast as mere entertainments of no scientific value whatsoever. Ratcliff's middle chapters go a long way to revising that interpretation, first by showing how diverse a century it was, and how many approaches to the instrument there were, and second by broadening the horizon immeasurably, taking in, as I have said, most of Europe. But superseding those bad old accounts ought not to involve showing that microscopical research was pretty good after all. To say that is either trivial, because all research is presumably good to those who practise it, or it is merely more Whiggishness, and indeed Ratcliff does say that the eighteenth century can be rehabilitated precisely because it paved the way for the nineteenth, which we know was worthwhile because it came just before the twentieth. (Not to mention that the microscope clearly was an entertainment for many contemporary practitioners and a large segment of the public.)

It is lamentable that some unstated bugbear with relativism – whatever that is in this context – has caused this self-misrepresentation: I find very little to fault in that long middle section, but it is inevitable that anachronism of a pernicious sort will result when poorly reasoned philosophy of science is applied to historical research. Merely to have presented the communication/cognition hypothesis as a speculative addendum would have been preferable. Not to have included it at all would have resulted in an excellent book.