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Peter Crowcroft. Elton's Ecologists: A History of the Bureau of Animal Population . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xx + 177, illus. ISBN 0-226-12146-1, £27.95, $35.00 (hardback); 0-226-12148-8, £12.75, $14.95 (paperback).

thesis is that biology was transformed, not revolutionized. Arguing against Garland Allen and others who have characterized this period as a 'revolt against morphology', she shows that the morphological focus can be seen as a continuous thread running through the work of the four biologists, even though they ended up asking different questions about the generation of organic form. Phylogenetic reconstruction fell into the background, but Conklin remained interested in this topic and Morgan contributed to it in his early years. The growing interest in the role of heredity as the determining factor in individual development did not immediately rule out the possibility of asking why two different groups had inherited the same pattern of early development. Wilson and Conklin established homologies between the development of annelids and gasteropods, a point of considerable interest to phylogenetic studies, even though both went on to concentrate on how the inherited developmental trend was expressed. In the end, of course, the tradition was transformed in so many different directions that it was pulled apart. The establishment of new research programmes such as Morgan's genetics has inevitably attracted much attention, but Maienschein's aim is to show how these new traditions arose continuously from the old. This thesis has obvious implications for the debate over the nature of research traditions, as well as that over the nature of scientific change. Maienschein addresses both of these issues explicitly, and on the whole I find her emphasis on continuity and interaction useful. Revolutions often seem more revolutionary by hindsight than they did to those who were actually involved. I am a little less enthusiastic about some concluding comments urging that research traditions should replace theories as the unit of study in the history of science. Theory-bashing is flavour of the month at the moment, but a few fossils such as myself remain sceptical about the revolutionary impact of the new techniques (as sceptical as Maienschein is about the revolt against morphology?). I would be the last to deny that we have learned a great deal from the new focus of attention, but I think we are in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bath-water. From Maienschein's perspective, evolution theory is of no value as a central theme because it gradually disappears from view as new techniques turned morphologists' attention to new problems. But from my perspective as a historian of evolutionism, what is so fascinating about the same period is the way in which ongoing questions about phylogeny were taken up by palaeontologists as they were abandoned by morphologists. Of course the techniques change, with all sorts of interesting consequences but here it is the theoretical questions which provide the continuity. Evolutionism was transformed by its switch to a new home among the palaeontologists, long before the experimentalists came back onto the science via the genetical theory of natural selection. It is easy to see why the rise of experimental biology has attracted so much attention, but all too often the continuation of older theoretical debates within established disciplines is forgotten in the rush to emphasize the new. To understand the transformation of American biology we need to read Ronald Rainger's studies of palaeontologists such as Henry Fairfield Osborn, as well as the more numerous accounts of the advent of experimentalism.