The secular ark. Studies in the history of biogeography

monarchist after the Restoration. He has been called an "unlovely conservative", possessed of "a genuine fear of change". Jacob's strategy here decodes apparently innocent texts (such as Stubbe's book on chocolate, The Indian nectar (1662)), or apparently conservative texts (such as those written against the Royal Society) as covering a motivated and sustained programme of radical vitalism and secular historicism. He rejects recent claims by Nicholas Steneck that the debate about the cures of the Irish "stroker", Valentine Greatrakes, reflects "conflicting natural philosophies" rather than "conflicting political ideologies". Jacob insists on the "shrewd, even devious calculation" which prompted Stubbe's interventions in such disputes, and uses this insistence in decoding true motives for Stubbe's actions. Much is missing from this account, however. Little attention is paid to Stubbe's role in arguments around the College of Physicians and iatrochemistry; the problem of the date of composition of Boyle's Free enquiry, allegedly a response to "Stubbians" in the early Restoration, is still unresolved; a full account of the equally complex strategies of men like Glanvill, Stubbe's target and respondent, is obviously essential in the work of deciphering the pamphlet war of the 1660s and 1670s. At the same time, it is not clear that the issues which divide writers such as Steneck and Jacob are going to be resolved by appeals to ever greater historical detail. Steneck reads The Indian nectar, for example, as a report of facts; Jacob reads the book as a critique of Presbyterianism, a statement sympathetic with Digger doctrines on property, and an attack on the Restoration' settlement. Stubbe's exchanges with Hobbes and his manuscript on Mahometan Christianity are used as the keys which unlock all the other texts he produced. There may, perhaps, be fruitful work to be done on other "turncoats", such as Marchamont Nedham, erstwhile theorist of absolutism who switched back and forth as propagandist for King and Parliament and then emerged as author of the remarkable Medela medicinae in 1665. Perhaps he, too, may be saved from that circle of history's Hell reserved for inconsistency. Ultimately, Jacob's most successful chapter is his final one on the links between Stubbe and the Deists of the later seventeenth century, but, as the response to other works on Newtonians and radicals has shown, that area is no more secure a basis for reductive interpretation than the one surveyed in this book. Simon Schaffer Imperial College London