Utopia’s Garden by Emma Spary, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
£44.50, ISBN 0226768627
WHAT is natural history for? It depends on who’s asking, says Emma Spary in
Utopia’s Garden. Anyone who’s had to justify their own scientific work to
sceptical politicians will appreciate her answer. And there can be few more
sharply defined examples than these from revolutionary France. A senior
researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin,
Spary examines the changes in the nascent discipline of natural history in
response to the turbulent change from royalist regime to a republic. Until the
French…
