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unfair one. Darwin’s spare, analytical prosecontrasts strongly with Green’s, which ismarked by overblown descriptive passages.Viewing the Andes from La Campana, a hillinland from Valparaiso, Darwin admires “thewonderful force which has upheaved thesemountains,” while Green observes that “theAndes rose from [the valleys] as a phoenix,laughing maniacally at the ashes below”.

Readers hoping for insights into theworkings of the young Darwin’s mind, or fora sense of on-the-road kinship with Darwin,will be disappointed. But, as a straight travelbook, Green’s has many charms, though hissuperficial preoccupation with Darwin bothdistracts and detracts from its account of anextraordinary journey. Saddled with Darwindoes indeed seem uncomfortably (andunnecessarily) saddled with Darwin.Andrew Berry is at the Museum of ComparativeZoology Laboratories, 26 Oxford Street,Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

observers. They emphasize the extent towhich not only modern attitudes, but alsothe categories that we automatically deploy,such as the dichotomy between the naturaland the supernatural, or between the naturaland the artificial, may obscure our percep-tion of earlier world views.

They magisterially survey developmentsin the content and function of wonder over aperiod of six centuries, stretching from thehigh Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, atwhich point wonder was, they argue, deci-sively banished from the intellectual arsenalof respectable European science. Monstersare not the only subjects of this handsomelydesigned and generously illustrated volume,but they offer the most compelling and vividexamples of its larger concerns.

But the trajectory the authors delineatewas far from straightforward. The fortunesof wonder, and of the marvellous objects inwhich it was embodied, rose and fell, as reli-gious, intellectual and political commit-ments shifted. At its medieval zenith, theadmiration and accumulation of marvelsstruck members of both the spiritual andtemporal ascendancies as a way of confirm-ing the established order. As is normally thecase, however, consensus was neitherabsolute nor stable. Dissenting scholarsassociated wonder with ignorance and fear.The intellectual stock of wonder rose againwith the European voyages of discovery,which revealed incontestable marvels previ-ously undreamed of, but then fell as the reli-gious and political turmoil of the seven-teenth century reconfirmed their associationwith disruption and fearsome portents.

After a brief reflorescence early in theEnlightenment, marvels retreated to the dis-reputable position that they have occupiedever since. This very brief summary can onlygesture at the richness and complexity of thestory that Daston and Park have to tell.Indeed, one of the most impressive featuresof the book is the skill and clarity with whichits authors explicate subtle alterations in

points of view and philosophical positions— despite their obscurity and counter-intuitiveness to modern sensibilities.

Daston and Park present an authoritativerereading of premodern ideas about thenatural order. Like any similarly ambitiousproject, it has limitations and omissions.The authors point out, for example, that,despite their efforts at contextualization,they have focused on élite ideas. And theineluctable need to reach a conclusion hasled them to exaggerate reports of their sub-ject’s ultimate demise.

However strong their triumphalist protes-tations, eighteenth-century naturalists didnot definitively jettison the marvellous. Theflotsam of the midway continued to fascinateand trouble scientists well into the nineteenthcentury, for the same reasons that anomalieshad captivated their predecessors. Exceptionsto the order of nature were illuminating, ifthey could ultimately be made to fit — and ifthey couldn’t be made to fit, then they had tobe debunked, in order to eliminate a threatthat was both intellectual and social.

Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (alsoknown as Rumpf), a cog in the elaborateDutch colonial machinery of the seven-teenth century and the author of TheAmbonese Curiosity Cabinet, does not appearin Park and Daston’s extensive bibliographyof sources. Nevertheless, his elaborate cata-logue — which deals primarily with marineinvertebrates native to Indonesian waters,but which also describes miscellaneous otherwonders, including remarkable minerals, aswell as potent stony objects extracted fromthe innards of cats, pigs, deer and people — isrepresentative of one large category of mate-rial upon which they draw in the second halfof Wonders and the Order of Nature.

As such, it gives a concrete sense of thescope and difficulty of the research thatunderlies their argument. It also suggestswhy many of their primary sources,although they have been published at somepoint, remain inaccessible to most modernreaders — doubly immured in libraries ofrare books and in Latin or in obscure earlyversions of modern languages. At the core ofthe new edition of The Ambonese CuriosityCabinet is a translation by the editor, E. M.Beekman, from seventeenth-century Dutch.The edition is well illustrated and includesextensive apparatus: background discus-sions of Rumphius’s life and career, and ofthe special problems posed by the transla-tion; a bibliography of his work; an elaborategeneral bibliography; and extensive notes. Itconstitutes a valuable contribution to thestudy of early colonial science — but it is easyto see why such editions do not exist forevery equally interesting early work of nat-ural philosophy or natural history.Harriet Ritvo is in the History Department,Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,Massachusetts 02139, USA.

book reviews

832 NATURE | VOL 400 | 26 AUGUST 1999 | www.nature.com

Boo: the Krakow monster of the 1540s portrayedlike a demon, with heads on its joints.

MainstreamingmonstersWonders and the Orderof Nature 1150–1750by Lorraine Daston and Katharine ParkZone Books: 1998. 511 pp. $35.95, £22.50The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinetby Georgius Everhardus RumphiusYale University Press: 1999. 567 pp. $45, £30

Harriet Ritvo

Pigs with human heads and feet may nowseem the incontestable province of tabloidnewspapers, but they and similarly astonish-ing violations of the quotidian order playedan important role in shaping the thought ofnatural philosophers and natural historiansof the medieval period, the Renaissance andthe Enlightenment. Over the past fewdecades, monsters have emerged, onceagain, from the shadowy corners of the history of science, to bask and wriggle in thefull glare of academic scrutiny. No longerstigmatized as mere antiquarian oddities,they have taken their place among more tra-ditional topics of scholarly investigation.

This signals a larger alteration in ourunderstanding of the scientific past. Theobjects of élite investigation and vulgarcuriosity have ceased to appear so widely sep-arated, and we no longer focus on theantecedents of current orthodoxy to theexclusion of ideas and methods that may haveseemed equally plausible, or even more so, atthe time when they were formulated.

In Wonders and the Order of Nature,1150–1750, Lorraine Daston and KatherinePark assert the intellectual importance ofwonder, the now-discredited emotion thatsuch inexplicable phenomena often inspiredin scholars, as well as in relatively naïve

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