interconnections among developments in science, policy, and the popular imagination which SpencerWeart attained in Nuclear Fear,the brilliant 1988 study of nuclear physics, is not approached. There are sticky fundamental issues about changing relations both actual and perceivcd betweenbasic and applied science over the period and across helds, which are glossed overnotwithstandingtheirobviousrelevance. Thelinkageofbiotechnological projects with the changing disciplinary landscape of the lif'e sciences is nor well developed: for instance, MIT's midcentury champion of a new discipline of 'biophysics', Francis Schmitt, is dismissed casually as a biologist with conservative 'ideas of his own' that sabotaged the MIT administration's ambitions to build up biological engineering. In fact Schmitt was in many ways a followerof bioengineering avatarLoeb. and the issue atMITwas over academic low culture (sewage engineering, food canning) versus high culture (electrophysiology, molecular self-assembly) interpretations of the biotechnology enterprise. Most historians will find trcatment of the topics they know best to be scanty and simplistic, I suspect, but again, this seems inevitable in a work of such broad scope and small size. It is certainly appropriate that an accomplished historian of chemistry should write about the history of biotechnology, and the way Bud weaves his technical understanding of industrial chemistry into the story is very impressive and enlightening. However, the story would probably look different if told from a standpoint in the history of lifb sciences. Bud might not so quickly adopt the idiosyncratic view though one not unique to Bud that 'biology' (as opposed to botany, zoology, physiology, etc.) makes its first appearance as a discipline around 1900, however well this may fit his restricted fbcus on the names of acadernic departments and journals. Recognising biology as a confederation of related disciplines with a continuously evolving collective identity from the end of the I 8th century, as the more traditional view has it, would allow a better representation of how various offers of technological benefit made by different disciplines and subdisciplines at different moments in the later l9th and earlier 20th centuries played a role in border struggles over turf and status. That is, biotechnology was not a product or promised product of one single discipline of biology, but of the nascent disciplines of general physiology, microbiology, plant physiology, genetics, and medical biomechanics, among others. The growth of genetics in the interwar period, with its stabilisalion in institutions, was attended by glowing promises of eugenic and agricultural payoffs, especially in America. The variously successful efforts of microbiologists in several European nations to fbund an autonomous academic discipline in the same period, and to break away from a medical service role, were oftenpredicated on promises of improved ffirvlews industrial fermentation. Bud touches on these promises and products, but not as much on their causes within the originating disciplines which motivated development of what we now consider elements of biotechnology. Biotechnology and its cognates bioengineering, biotechnik, and so on have always been a motley category, like biology itself. Even today in what we class as biotechnology, though there is a predominance of the proclucts ofmolecular genetics, there are also contributions ofother disciplines' suchnsprosthetic limbsforamputees andsoil nematodes thatcontrol croppests. The way Bud clescribes it one would think there is today one unitary enterprise called 'biotechnology', and that the enterprise has a long history. This is probably not Butl's intention, but a byproduct of his story's compression' Biotechnology is nore a question of long histories of scientific and practical disciplines, together with recent reification as a single investment and policy category. All this is not to detract from Bud's work, but only to suggest that much more remains to be done on the large and important topic of the history of biotechnology. TheUsesof Life willconstituteanessentialstartingpointfor studies on this topic lbr many years to come. Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Syclney, New South Wales, Australia. Cruel Carnal Reason By John Sutton fl e=4f,(r$n//6' t\.s.r tdf4t r &qqk) Kenneth Craven, Jonathun SwiJi and the Millenium of Maclness:The Information Age in Swift's A Tale of a Tub' Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992.Pp. xiv + 238. US$68.57 HB. n an cxciting, idiosyncratic book, Kenneth Craven rejuvenates Swift's 1 704 satire A Tale of a ftrb, a skewed and vibrant verbal assault on early modern political theory, ethics, and philosophy of psychology. Swift would not, on Craven's reading, be surprised to find that his wayward, twisting, twisted work seems rather dank to modern readers ignorant of the victims of its savagery. Swift had already mocked the future interpreters who would skim and scan prolil'erating information systems for clues he had secreted: but Craven is comfortably self'-conscious about the paradoxes of elucidating with scholarly passion a compressed mockery of scholarship. He succeeds at least in reclaiming Swif t from l gth century literary hislory for llth century intellectual history. The body of Craven's work is a series of eight studies of Swift's particular violent anatomies of mostly unnamed targets: those on the radical philosopher John Tolancl, the conservative Dubiin Anglicans Narcissus Marsh and Peter Browne, Shaftesbury, riterary and poritical followers of Milton and of Harrington, Swift's own employer willio* Temple, Paracelsian medicine, and Newtonian mechanicJ. These studies are framed by chapters on the grounding myth of Kronos-Saturn, the melancholy deity of time, balance, art and the humours. craven secs this myth as Swift's alternative to the unpalatable l Tth century choice between wishful Neoplatonism and fragmenting atomism. But little o1,a positive programme emerges from this reading other than a tendency towards authoritarian impositions oforderto balancetheinternal chaos andlanaticism of the unaided individual. craven's swiftis closerto Hobbes, in politics and psychology, than Swift himself could afford to admit. Swift attends well, in his conservative way, to the microphysics of human nature, frustrated at the anti-naturalism of optimistic liberal moralists and revolutionaries. In relying on the powers of ieason to alter things lbr the better, social reformers like Milton, Toland, and Shaftesbury forget the body and are then haunted by it. psychology is libidinally driven; contemplation and the spirit must in rime 'lall into matter', forreason is itselfcarnal,lanatical, seeking while overtly renouncing forbidden 'Mixture and confusion of Sexes'. Denying the desir-e underneath utopian progressivism leads both to the deranged publication frenzies .f modern mythologists (licensing of the press had lapsed in 1695), and to the cruelties enacted each time reason pretends to enter virtuously into .the Depth of Things ... with Tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing'. Swift is a spoiler of millenarian dreams, scorning the moderns' nostalgia for the womb-blisses of a Golden Age, pointing out the concealed violence of their rational dissections, reiterating that only bodies know. I particularly enjoyed Craven,s accounts of the affronted responses of wotton, Clarke, and Shaftesbury to the still anonymous author of the Tale, about whom they coulcl be sure of nothing tau" irir clepravity. They complain that, in refusing ro acknowledge human dignity ina .tne superiority and excellency of reason', the author, who does not even deserve to be argued with, has ridiculed what samuel clarke, one architect of the new Anglican-Newtonian order, called 'all virtue and government of a man's self' (pp.l44-6). In response, Swift gleefully continued to trample over those valued virtues vaunted in Shaftesbury's aggrieved reactionJ to EVIEWS the inegularity and obscenity of the Tale's 'false wit' (pp.86-7 , 99-103). Craven rejects the judgements of historians of science that Swift had only a superficial knowledge of the sciences he attacks (pp. 1469): but insufficient detail is presented. Chapter Nine ('Newton: millenial mechanics'), for instance, contains nothing on mechanics and little on Newton. It is primarily a critique of contemporary writers like Margaret Jacob and Charles Webster for being duped into accepting myths of scientific progress and continuing the headlong modern attempt to enlist the discourses of hard science for reform of all human endeavour (pp. I 86-7). This is a naive reading of the work of Jacob and Webster; perhaps, like Swift, excessively concerned to situate himself in opposition to many strands ofcontemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, Craven occasionally loses the keen satiric tone which mark's his historical analyses. Craven is better on medicine and Swift's hostility, in the Tale's Digtession on Madness, towards proto-Jungian Paracelsian 'astral chemistry' and medical spiritualism. Swilirelocates occultcorrespondences and astral pneuma to the alimentary canal. In a psychophysiological deconstruction of both mystical and political enthusiasm, he sees powerful digestive and sexual messages from the lower body placing 'the brain under chaotic siege' (p.166). New anatomy and medical mechanism reveal only guts and the inhumanity of experimenters flaying and mangling bodies in the name of science; only old saturnine melancholy is true to the 'erring, humorous self' (p.224). But, in reassessing Swift's science, we need more detail here on the kinds of humoural medicine being preferred to iatromechanism and iatrochemistry. and on exactly which strands of the old Saturn-melancholy patterns of thought Swift wished to retain. As it stands, Craven fails to back up his claim that Swift here reveals a 'sophisticated understanding of object relations' (p.159). More specific analysis of Swift's neurophilosophical reading and targets is required. The hypothesis of directlinks between orcommon sources forpsychological, digestive and libidinal energies, for example, was a commonplace in mechanistic Cartesian physiology; how ironically is Swift embracing it? Eachchapterraises such doubts andqueries. Likethe alienated satirist reclassifying the various modern madnesses in surprising ways, Cravendraws unusual linesthroughotherareas,includingpoliticalpsychology, publishing ethics, and religious toleration. He is good, too, on those intrusions of personal animus into Swift's satire which only biographical detail make clear. This playful, sad, humane book demands serious readins. Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.