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Book Reviews : Scenes from deep time. Early pictorial representations of the prehistoric world. By M. J. S. Rudwick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. xiii + 280 pp. US $45.00 cloth. ISBN 0 226 73104 9

Whence do we derive our perceptions of prehistory, its physical landscapes, its biotic features, its animal forms? In this lusciously illustrated volume, laced with textual interspersions, Martin Rudwick introduces his readers to a remarkable suite of illustrations of the ’deep past’ produced by geologists and associated artists during the last century. His investigations centre on the establishment and evolution of this graphic ’genre’ a tradition of a very special kind of pictorial representation that emerged at a particular point in time and in particular cultural circumstances. Indeed, this project can be seen as part of a larger programme of work in which Rudwick has been engaged: to attend to the neglected study of what he calls ’visual language’ in science and to rectify an expressed dissatisfaction with ’the excessively textual orientation of scholarly work in all branches of the history of science’ (p. xi). There is certainly much to be said in favour of this diagnosis. For the power of the visual is of very considerable proportions. If cartographic representation is designed to annihilate the space between here and there, pictorial representations of deep time are intended to annihilate the space between now and then. In the process, the constructions of the cartographer and the scientific illustrator can all too easily be passed off as mere visual reproductions of there and then, rather than as construc-