YANKEE SCIENCE IN THE MAKING

Swell background material, that with more challenging editing might have been made into an outstanding and popular history of science, a book along the lines of the widely publicized Mechanization Takes Command by Giedion (see P. 185). The book deals with New England's contributions from Colonial times to the Civil War in the fields of astronomy, navigation, canal and road building, manufacturing, natural history, geology and archaeology. Taken in small doses, the material is fascinating; perhaps not intended for straight ahead reading. The author has obviously done an extraordinarily painstaking labor of research, but has no sense of relative importance or editing his material, and bogs down in detail. Sell it as a ""Flowering of N.E. Science"".