This challenging, insightful and meticulously researched book is a history of the so-called ‘law of correlation’ in palaeontology, the principle by which certain anatomical features necessarily accompanied certain other anatomical features, thus enabling the reconstruction of whole animals from fragmentary fossil remains. As Dawson points out (p. 3), in the early nineteenth century this ‘law’ was as central to the development of palaeontology as was the nebular hypothesis to astronomy or, later, evolution to biology. In the hands of Georges Cuvier and his diverse body of admirers and followers throughout the century – most famously Richard Owen – the ‘law of correlation’ provided an authoritative methodology to a controversial new science, as well as wowing audiences with an image of its uncanny predictive power. It was both a scientific practice and a scientific idea. Dawson's cultural-historical approach does full justice to both these aspects by analysing the working practices of palaeontologists and their discussions with scientific peers alongside the ways in which they and others treated the idea of the law of correlation when addressing wider audiences of various kinds, especially in periodicals and other print publications, but also in lectures. Dawson's long-standing expertise in interpreting print media makes him an especially valuable guide here, and, as one of the growing number of historians of science who are also literary scholars, his sensitivity to the nuances of rhetoric, representation and textual form enables him to cut through to the heart of the arguments at stake as he traces ongoing debates in a dizzying range of personal, social, geographical and political contexts. Often assumed to have received its death blow at Thomas Huxley's hands in the 1850s, Cuvier's law of correlation turns out to have enjoyed a lively career throughout the century, and to have been extremely adaptable, even to what we usually see as diametrically opposite scientific paradigms (such as Darwinian evolution).

At the heart of this book is Dawson's contention that the law of correlation, like so many other scientific laws, was wielded for different purposes by different interest groups within and outside scientific communities. This may sound like familiar territory: Adrian Desmond and James Moore showed some years ago how Cuvierian methodology was used as a bulwark of Tory Anglican conservatism by Owen and savaged for the same reason by Huxley. Dawson builds on this line of inquiry, and Owen and Huxley dominate his book for good reason. But he takes the constructivist lesson deeper, by paying much closer attention to how Owen and Huxley (and others) articulated, defended or criticized the law of correlation (and its scope) when addressing different audiences – even to the extent of reversing their opinions altogether when their local purposes seemed to require it. Thus Huxley's supposed victory over Owen emerges as much more limited than has been assumed; Owen emerges as a nimbler manipulator of new communication technologies than the vigorous young Turk who attacked his ideas as outmoded; supposed test cases such as the Archaeopteryx turn out to be partial red herrings; and not only the structures and affiliations of ancient animals, but also the very scientific method used to reconstruct them, are revealed to have been surprisingly malleable.

One of the furthest-reaching aspects of Dawson's findings has to do with its identification of precise, non-trivial ways in which science's representation to wider non-specialist audiences affected the practice of science within the scientific establishment. This way of complicating the hierarchical distinction between ‘popular science’ and ‘science proper’ has often been invoked in recent decades as a challenge to the old ‘diffusion model’ of science popularization, but Dawson has documented such ‘reverse diffusionism’ (or, as we might call it, teaching-led research) in an especially detailed and convincing manner.

This is a substantial book whose rigorous pursuit of a single principle of scientific method ends up shedding unexpected light on many other matters, from Darwin's research on variation within species and the politics of racial science to the Crystal Palace Company's publicity machine and the methods of fin de siècle fictional detectives. High points for me included Chapter 4's discussion of Owen's pseudonymous ghost stories and his voracious reading of mid-Victorian serial fiction. Not only does Dawson manage the improbable feat of demonstrating important methodological links between serial fiction and comparative anatomy, but the odious Owen emerges with a human face, at least among his closest friends (though, as the rest of the book makes clear, there is no need for us to abandon cherished images of Owen as an utter cad). Even more delightful, and revealing, is Dawson's account of the ‘psychometric’ approach promoted by some late nineteenth-century North American geologists: touching a fossil bone, the inspired investigator entered a kind of mesmeric trance and experienced the life prehistoric. Thus the elegant Elizabeth Denton became the first female investigator to repeat Cuvier's claim of reconstructing an entire creature from a single bone. With a bit of mastodon tooth-enamel jammed against her forehead, she said, ‘I feel like a perfect monster … I feel like getting down on all fours … My ears are very large and leathery’, etc. (p. 354). Her divinations were taken quite seriously by other geologists, and help Dawson to make a perfectly serious point. The appeal to supernatural, prophetic inspiration which hovered around the reconstructive feats of the Cuvierian palaeontologist could thus, given the right circumstances, become quite literal.

My only real gripe was the publisher's insistence on endnotes instead of footnotes. When combined with the author–date referencing system, this requires the dexterity of an octopus for any reader wanting to see which works are being cited. It also seems unnecessary: the book's main readership consists of students and scholars, who are not known for being allergic to footnotes.

My reservations about the text itself affect only details of its argument or framing. First, notwithstanding the originality of Dawson's approach, he rather exaggerates when he claims that some of its component features, such as the analysis of the popular ‘afterlife’ of a scientific theory after its formal exclusion from scientific orthodoxy, have ‘never been previously utilized in the history of science’ (p. 11): the work of Alison Winter on mesmerism, Ronald Numbers on creationism and Christine Garwood on flat-earth theories suggests the contrary. Second, it is odd to see the palaeontology of Cuvier and his followers labelled ‘overtly nonprogressive’ (pp. 8, 132) and as implying a ‘static nature’ (p. 127) when one of its main claims was the power to reveal the progressive unfolding of increasingly advanced life forms on earth over millions of years, whether by law or by special creation, in ‘a progress Godwards’, as one admirer of Cuvier, Agassiz, Buckland and Owen put it in the 1850s. Buckland himself is made out to be more conservative than he really was: the view that cave fossils had been washed there by Noah's Flood, attributed to him on p. 57, was in fact decisively challenged by him in the book cited (Reliquiae Diluvianae) in order to stage his sensational (and implicitly progressionist) reconstruction of an antediluvian ecosystem, as Martin Rudwick's Bursting the Limits of Time (2005) makes clear. Lastly, while Dawson rightly corrects the common understanding of Huxley as a universally successful popularizer, his argument seems unfairly weighted against Huxley in one or two particulars. For example, he suggests that Huxley's working-class audiences in the 1880s would have been unable to understand his allusions to Voltaire's Zadig (widely available since the 1790s in cheap reprints of Francis Ashmore's translation) or to read thirty-page scientific articles with no pictures. The work of Jonathan Rose and Anne Secord on working-class reading and artisan science casts serious doubt on these assumptions. For Huxley, then, to publish the same workingmen's lecture in a middlebrow journal was no admission of failure to meet the artisans’ needs, but a sign that he was now targeting a different primary audience with the same argument, considering it suitable for both. In any case, access to middlebrow periodicals was not restricted to those who could afford to buy a copy.

But these are incidental quibbles in an otherwise thoroughly convincing, refreshing and rigorously researched monograph. Despite its length and its apparently abstruse subject, it is a pleasure to read, thanks to Dawson's lively style and his tight grip over his argument as it leads us between Paris, London, New Zealand, New England, the Crimea and elsewhere. This book deserves to be read well beyond the domain of ‘earth science history’. In its distinctive blend of methodologies, its integration of remarkably diverse source materials, its bridging of the gap between histories of scientific controversy and histories of ‘popular science’, and its combination of fine-grained local analysis with a transnational and longue durée narrative, Show Me the Bone merits the close attention of anyone interested in the making of science in the age of industrial print culture.