Dictionary of occult, hermetic and alchemical sigils

to electrostatics and magnetism during the second half of the eighteenth century, accompanied by the increasing employment of sophisticated instruments. Even within such a dense account of early modern physics, Heilbron manages to include an extensive examination of the "boundary conditions" (my term, not his) on the scientific activity he explores: the social, financial, educational, and institutional contexts in which the work was done. Thus we have accounts of the Jesuits, many European academies and societies, of the working conditions, courses, and salaries of European university and college teachers, and of independent operators of all sorts and conditions whose main aim was the popularization of science. However, although very useful in itself, this account of the extra-scientific boundary conditions illuminates very little of what goes on in Parts IH-V, since Heilbron does not tell us exactly how these boundary conditions shaped the science that developed within them. Heilbron makes one striking claim, for which his book constitutes a sizeable body of evidence: "the single most important contributor to the support of the study of experimental physics in the seventeenth century was the Catholic Church, and, within it, the Society of Jesus" (p. 2). This is a view not often met with in the pages of Past and Present, and should be set as an interpretative test-piece for the supporters of the Merton-Hill-Webster thesis. More precisely, and more constructively, we should ask ourselves what it was that seventeenth-century Jesuits and Puritans had in common. There is a full index, and a superb 69-page bibliography. Alan Gabbey Department of History and Philosophy of Science Queen's University Belfast