The author of this book, Sherrie Lynne Lyons, asks this question: What is it that distinguishes scientific inquiry from other sorts of investigation? She chooses several episodes to explore this question, all of them belonging to the nineteenth century. They include the existence of sea serpents, which was extensively discussed both in the popular and scientific press in the early nineteenth century, and other subjects more familiar to historians, phrenology and spiritualism. The book ends with a discussion of Thomas Huxley and some thoughts on contemporary scientific controversies around sociobiology.

The literature on sea serpents encapsulates the basic issues. The subject aroused intense public interest stimulated by supposed sightings and the sworn dispositions as to sightings of these monsters. Sea serpents were incorporated in exhibitions, theatrical productions, and maybe even children’s games. From a twentieth-century perspective, this may all seem odd, but Lyons does a good job of showing how reputable scientists like Charles Lyell and Richard Owen were caught up in this debate. She also reproduces an analysis of articles on the sea serpent in respectable scientific journals of the period. Crucially significant in the investigation of the sea serpent was the need for specimens. This had the potential to move the debate from the possible existence of sea serpents to their real existence. So scientists would be relatively opened minded in the search for these creatures in the fossil record. Or they were hopeful that a living example might, with luck, be captured. This again illustrates the point that the boundaries between these possibly mythological creatures and empirical scientific reconstruction of nature were certainly not clear-cut.

In the early nineteenth century, how much more startling than the sea serpent was the dinosaur, which still continues to exercise a fabulous and semimythological status among the public at large. The vibrancy of early nineteenth-century debates was fueled by the constant discovery of new and often strange fossils through excavation. Often marvelous and strange species were recovered by travel and geographical exploration. Thus, agnosticism on the issue of the sea serpent and careful examination of the evidence seems a perfectly appropriate response. In addition, Lyons shows how the existence or not of these creatures might challenge the favorite theories of the scientists involved. A living sea serpent resembling some fossil form of sea creature could potentially deal a blow against Lyell’s progressionism. So both Lyell and his opponent Richard Owen were exercised by the possible existence of these creatures, although both remained skeptical.

The author sees the episode as fundamentally a dispute about the authority of science in Victorian society. She returns to the subject in the chapter on Huxley. The book emphasizes both the amorphous nature of scientific inquiry at the time and the lack of clearly defined boundaries between marginal and mainstream science. Lyons uses a discussion of spiritualism and phrenology to illustrate this. In the first case, the author analyzes Wallace’s conversion to spiritualism in relation to his views on human evolution. In the second case, she argues that the phrenological view of a graduation in faculties between animals and man assisted Darwin in his break from natural theological reasoning about the status of humans in nature.

The book is well written. A good deal of the material is a summary of secondary sources but, with a few exceptions, based on wide reading. Although not original, these sections are certainly useful for teaching. The most original parts of the book relate to the discussion and interpretations of all these episodes in the history of science and, in particular, the emergence of the notion of accredited scientific practice and the authority it enjoys in our society today.

First, in the discussion of sociobiology the author concedes that the notion of marginal and mainstream science is still problematic. The imagination harnesses human perceptions of science to mythologies, mostly harmless but sometimes noxious. Scientists are not immune to this. The boundaries of science are being constantly policed, reasserted, attacked, redefined. Consequently, odd and eccentric theories that future generations might see as marginal still invade modern scientific dialogue. Given this, the secret to the process of the emergence of modern accredited science might be explained not by philosophical changes but in the actual structures, institutions, and rituals that scientists created in the nineteenth century. These include the scientific journal, the funding committee, the refereeing system, the professional scientific career, the science degree, and research as a normal component of a scientific career. These institutional changes provide a formidable set of collective controls over the practice of science. But marginal science—the recent House of Common’s investigation of homeopathic remedies is one good example of the survival of a thriving and commercially successful marginal science—still flourishes. So too does the public use of nature, often mediated through popular science, in entertainment and myth.