82 Reviews of Books

litical or social developments, they simply describe artifacts and constructions.

When they write, "From the technological standpoint the glories of Greece and
Rome can easily be over-estimated," the reader might expect some explanation of
the dichotomy between the scientific, philosophical, and literary achievements of
Greece and the technical advances. This discussion does not materialize. Instead,
they later show that the Greeks and Romans did make significant technological
contributions.
One would also expect that these general historical chapters would mention
philosophical and psychological changes, but these are not dealt with. And what
is one to think of the authors' historical approach when, describing the era which
saw the Reform Act of 1832, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the first Factory Acts,
and the outburst of Chartist agitation, they write: "For the period 1815-1851, the
highlights of political history offer an unreliable guide to economic development"?
If one disregards that ill-starred attempt to "improve" upon the five-volume
Singer work, one finds that the chronological division, devoting slightly more
than half the text to the period from 175o to 1900, probably is an improvement
over the proportions of the earlier work. The arrangement by topics within the
large chronological chunks has, however, some disadvantages; it seems strange to
read about Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers midway through a seven-hundred-
page book on technology to 1900. Some technological developments that appeared
in the larger work are omitted here, for example, the work of Beau de Rochas
in developing the four-stroke cycle in combustion engines. While several pages
are given to the development of speech and writing, there is no discussion of
draftsmanship and blueprints; yet these farm the language of engineering.
This volume contains all the defects, plus many of the merits, of the Singer
volumes; in addition, it has defects and merits of its own. No other single volume
contains as much material on technological growth, including some of the home-
lier crafts. It is a handy mine of factual information and the only textbook deal-
ing with its subject as other than simply a history of engineering progress. The
authors may have failed in their "underlying intention" to relate the history of
technology to general history, but they have succeeded admirably in compress-
ing the history of technology. Whereas the Singer volumes must be used as an
encyclopedia, this volume can be used as a textbook—like Bede's.

Case Institute of Technology MELVIN KRANZBERG

THE CITY IN HISTORY: ITS ORIGINS, ITS TRANSFORMATIONS, AND

ITS PROSPECTS. By Lewis Mumford. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World. 1961. Pp. xi, 657. $11.5o.)
IN stating, as Lewis Mumford notes in his acknowledgments, that he is "a
generalist, not a specialist in any single field," the author of The City in History
puts his finger on the chief difficulty of subjecting his new book to a critical ap-

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 Mum ford: The City in History 83
praisal of its soundness as history. Few historians, including myself, possess the
all-embracing knowledge to judge the reliability of all the evidence Mumford
pours into his nearly six hundred pages of text. When, for example, after pointing
out that "property, in the civilized sense of the word, did not exist in primitive
communities," he adds: "It remained for civilization to create artificial famines
to keep the worker chained to his task, so that the surplus might ensure the rich
man's feast," the reader who lacks anthropological training and has at best only
a smattering of familiarity with the urban developments of early Mesopotamia
and Egypt is prone to wonder whether the generalization is not an exaggeration
that partly defeats the very purpose of the analysis by raising serious doubts about
its validity. Yet if suspected overstatement now and again lessens the impact of
some of the author's pronouncements, paradoxically the conscious iconoclasm that
obtrudes itself with an almost impish insistence from scores of passages constitutes
one of the major contributions of this thought-provoking book.
In sober fact, as the attentive student reads on, he is likely to discover, unless
academic niceties have blurred his perceptions, that Mumford's occasional over-
dramatic punch lines, like some of his seeming oversimplifications, do not really
matter, for the sweep of the study and the challenging character of the ideas it
presents are compelling. If he depicts the virtues of the twelfth- or thirteenth-cen-
tury town of Western Europe in excessively bright colors, most medievalists, I
believe, will agree that the over-all picture that emerges is an accurate delineation
of a community in which religion, the search for beauty, the sense of human dig-
nity, and common purpose are the dominant life motifs. His rebuke to moderns
who equate medieval with primitive and barbarous is effective. The last third of
the book is naturally the most controversial, as it reaches down into the present
and deals with questions about which every city dweller feels himself qualified to
have an opinion. The central theme is the change in the modes of thinking, the
physical and spiritual consequences of the rise of capitalism, and the growth of the
industrial city. If economic historians consider Mumford's diagnosis of causes faulty,
and mid-twentieth-century city planners reject indignantly some of his strictures
on their basic assumptions, it is still difficult to see how either group of specialists
can deny the aptness of much of his analysis of the results. Just as his appreciation
of the medieval city derives from his admiration for its stress upon human values,
so his estimate of the errors in city building in the industrial age and its creation
of "Cybernetic Deities" follows logically from his criticism of the dehumanized
attitude that sets greater store by the machine than by human personality. Much
of the data on the present-day "megapolis" is profoundly depressing, but, as the
author observes, only people who are aware of "the disintegrations of the metro-
politan stage . . . will be capable of directing our collective energies into more
constructive processes." While in my judgment he might well have held out
more hope by pointing to the slowly reviving recognition of the importance of the
neighborhood in giving focus to modern city living, that topic admittedly would

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 8 4 Reviews of Books
tend to roam beyond the confines of history into the realm of prophecy. And in the
areas he has chosen to explore over some thousands of years, his depth of insight
is impressive.
Magnificent illustrations, each accompanied by at least a half page of detailed
comment, help carry conviction to the doubter. For whereas a peppering of poly-
syllables and of pronouns whose antecedents of ten lie three or four sentences back
makes some of the text hard reading, the pictures speak for themselves. Further-
more, a fifty-five-page bibliography in which an asterisk denotes a particularly
significant work and a sentence or two occasionally underscores the strength or
weakness of a study supplies an invaluable tool for the person who wishes to dig
deeper into problems that concern all the modern world.
W ashington,D. C. CONSTANCE MCLAUGHLIN GREEN

FORERUNNERS OF DARWIN: 1745-1859. Edited by Bentley Glass et al.,

under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins History of Ideas Club. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press. 1959. Pp. iii, 3-471. $6.5o.)
THE fifteen essays in this volume comprise papers presented at the History of
Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins University, and some of the most important writing
to come out of the Darwin centenary observation. The volume also testifies to the
dominant influence of Arthur 0. Lovejoy in intellectual history generally and its
relationships to the history of biology in particular. Thus Lovejoy is represented in
this volume by six essays: analyses of the relationship of Von Baer, Kant, Herder,
Buffon, and Schopenhauer to various aspects of the concept of development, and
a revised and enlarged version of his pioneering essay of igog, "The Argument
for Organic Evolution before the Origin of Species."
Lovejoy's analyses alone would make this an important book, but the other
authors represented have also distinguished themselves. Each of these essays is
based on new research; each presents important viewpoints regarding the history
of biology and its relationships to the history of ideas. Most important, some serve
as corrective reassessments of traditional conceptions, and all such qualities are
further illustrations of Lovejoy's influence. For example, there is the impressive
work of Francis C. Haber, who, in two essays, traces the history of speculation
and observation relative to those primary indicators of biological time—fossil re-
mains. Bentley Glass provides two very valuable studies of the history of the species
concept as related to genetics, the mechanisms of heredity, and the concept of
variation. He has also written a highly original appraisal of the role of Maupertuis
in the eighteen-century history of the evolution idea. Owsei Temkin's essay trac-
ing the history of German speculative philosophy concerning change and develop-
ment in the decade before Darwin fills an important gap in the later history of
romanticism and of its biological handmaiden, Naturphilosophie. An admirable
example of historical-biological detective work is Jane Oppenheimer's "An Embry-

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