A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences.

The author's stated research interest is to understand the French Royal Academy of Sciences "in the most inclusive context possible" (xii), and if that goal remains out of reach in this volume, Stroup has produced a well-written, beautifully researched study which sheds much light on the Academy and on botany in the period from the institution's founding in 1666 up to the new royal regulations of 1699.

The early chapters trace in detail the funding of salaries, physical plants, and research by the Academy's first three royal "protectors": Colbert, Louvois, and Pontchartrain. (A fifty-page appendix provides records of Academy expenditures for the period.) Each minister is distinctive in terms of his own inclinations and responses to external factors that constrain the budget, but what strikes me is the long-run continuity of research efforts and the relative lack of tensions between royal authority and the academicians. While waiting for permission from the cost-conscious Pontchartrain to extend the meridian, the astronomers busied themselves, as they had under Louvois, with a variety of other important scientific work. It is no surprise that expensive projects were subject to starts and stops according to the wishes of the protectors, but more modest efforts proceeded usually unimpeded or were helped under Academy sponsorship. Potential conflicts between individuals and royal control were apparently mitigated by a basic consensus regarding the conduct and content of research and by the Academy's ability in general to serve both corporate and individual needs.

The centerpiece of Stroup's scientific analysis is botany, which falls into two broad streams: the traditional descriptive natural history and the relatively new botanical philosophy which sought at that time to understand "processes related to the plant's life cycles" (118). Chief exemplar of the former is the Academy plant project, a major collaborative effort to describe and analyze vast numbers of plants. As a grand-scale, collective, Baconian effort, the plant project was ideally suited to the new Academy. Contributors to it could speak of cooperation, progress, and utility, but it foundered badly and almost interminably due to its collective nature and overly ambitious goals. In contrast, studies in the natural philosophy of plants were conducted typically by individuals on a modest scale, and the Academy functioned chiefly and successfully as a body of referees in such cases, a role that became the norm in the eighteenth century.

Stroup's concern with the natural philosophy of plants expands her story considerably and anchors botany within the scientific revolution. Just as Galileo, Newton, and Descartes had advanced a "unitary conception of natural forces" (119), botanists searched for the unity between plants and animals, probing an often presumed analogy between circulations of blood and sap. In the new natural philosophy of plants we see an important divergence from the great Renaissance catalogs of natural history. In a critically updated version, the Renaissance descriptive tradition lived on, of course, but it was paralleled by natural philosophers intent on using new ideas - often borrowed from zoology - and new instruments to understand the nature of plants. The extensive treatment of botanical natural philosophy is revealing and quite interesting, but one sees very little of the Academy in this discussion.

Rounding out the book are excellent chapters on late seventeenth-century scientific life in Paris and on communications between academicians and the outside world. The analysis of botany is very good indeed, but there are many other doors to open as well in order to understand the Academy in a more inclusive sense. Still, this is a rewarding and engaging book for its views of both botany and the Royal Academy.

JIM LLANA State University of New York, Old Westbury