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Anna Bramwell. Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 292. ISBN 0-300-04343

diatoms and other planktonic organisms in the laboratory. Quirkily, by the end of the 1940s, the theoretical consensus emerging from Plymouth was pretty much the same as the ultimate vision grasped for at Kiel: that marine communities were delicately balanced homeostatic systems based on the interactions of physical, chemical and biological processes. Blood and pastureland were not too dissimilar in the end. The Plymouth group's elegant application of reductionist methods to phytoplankton photosynthesis, nutrient uptake and growth, and their quantitative studies of grazing, based on the farmer's idea of a standing crop, were exercises in mathematical ecology largely ignored by other, more mainstream English and American ecologists. Two excellent concluding chapters place the development of biological oceanography in America firmly in context and describe Gordon Riley's battle for a more mathematical approach towards the complexities of biological communities. These supply quite a different angle on the usual Woods Hole story, for example, and would repay close attention from historians of the ecological movements in Europe and America at the time. What this book achieves is therefore somewhat more than its title would suggest: over and above the detailed discussion of the main figures and intellectual themes of a developing discipline there are pertinent historiographical remarks and a judicious assessment of institutional affairs.