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undermine simple binary conceptions of sex dif-ferences and chromosomal sex determination.There is no talk of mental blocks on Gold-schmidts part, but antifeminism, anti-Semitism,and racism are invoked to explain why other

scientists rejected Goldschmidt and his concep-tions in favor of the stable genes and hierarchiesof mainstream genetics.

The reactionary Butenandt, blinkered by abinary view of the sexes, misguidedly set out todiscover separate male- and female-determininghormones and always downplayed the fact thatevery individual secreted hormonal mixtures.He also placed hormones in gendered, hierarchi-cal relationships with the cells and organs theysupposedly controlled. That gendered hierarchywas transferred to the genes and their effects,

because Butenandt classed genes with hormonesas biologically active substances (Wirkstoffe).This precluded questions about gene cytoplasminteractions from even arising.

The book ends with a call to get rid of hier-archies and degender our conceptions of thegenes and all the cell components that generatebiological differences. In Satzingers story, thegender order has continually thwarted progresstoward this goal, but it is a goal nonetheless, andit gives the book an underlying whiggishness.There is an implied directionality to the history

of genetics, and it is always clear whether Satz-inger thinks someone is advancing the programor being blocked or misdirected. Repeated jux-tapositions of the wrong turns in genetics withturns toward Nazi racial ideology strike me astendentious, even though no clear causal con-nection is ever articulated.

Despite the questionable interpretations, Dif-ferenz und Vererbung is impressive for theamount of research that went into it, especiallyinto the reconstruction of so many scientificcareersnot only of the leading scientists, but

also of large numbers of assistants and collabo-rators, male as well as female, who were scat-tered by World War II. The book is meticulouslydocumented, and it will be a great resource forhistorians of German biology. (For that purpose,a subject index would have been better than justa name index.)

SANDER GLIBOFF

Henning Schmidgen. Die Helmholtz-Kurven:Auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit. 270 pp., illus.,

figs., bibl. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2010.Historians of science have returned frequently toHermann Helmholtzs early career, fascinatedby his remarkable contributions in physiology,

physics, and psychology, in a context close tothe Prussian political revolution of 1848 and thetakeoff of German industrialization in the1850s. Through a combination of surprising ar-chival discovery and perspicacious interpreta-

tion, Henning Schmidgen has resolved some ofthe critical issues in a central theme of Helm-holtzs early work: his use of graphical record-ing methods and time-measurement apparatus inhis early physiological research.

Schmidgen introduces Die Helmholtz-Kur-ven: Auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit with athrilling account of the archival sleuthing thatuncovered the critical documents in his story. InSeptember 1851, Helmholtzs research on thevelocity of nerve transmission was communi-cated to the French Academy of Sciences by his

colleague Emil Du Bois-Reymond. Helmholtzspaper described his method of measuring thevelocity of nerve transmission with self-registered curves, an alternative to his alreadywell-known measurements of the same factsusing a modified Pouillet ballistic galvanometer.Those factsthat the nerve impulse traveled ata speed of about 27 meters per second had metwith skepticism from a scientific communitythat had long assumed nerve transmission to benearly instantaneous. With his frog-drawingmachine Helmholtz recorded curves drawn bythe frogs contracting muscle after its nerve hadbeen electrically stimulated. The curves un-folded in three distinct phases, including a cru-cial latent phase of lost time (temps perdu) ofabout one-hundredth of a second. Helmholtzsexperiment thus resolved a critical problem oflong standing in physiology, psychology, andphilosophy. But it also did much more. It of-fered a crucial demonstration of a new dynamicvision of life, and it foregrounded the new ex-perimental technique that realized that vision inburgeoning new laboratories.

Schmidgen noticed that the curves themselveswere omitted from the version of the paper pub-lished in the academys Comptes Rendus, de-spite the fact that they were reported to havebeen placed before the eyes of the academy.Wondering whether the curves had made it toParis, and what had happened to them, Schmid-gen traveled to Paris on a hunch that they mighthave been deposited in the archives of the acad-emy. The Helmholtz curves turned out to be

just where Schmidgen suspected. This excitingdiscovery of the curves in their full materialityprovides the springboard for a possibly defini-

tive account of Helmholtzs early use of graph-ical methods and techniques of physiologicaltime measurement.

Schmidgen shows how Helmholtzs instrumental

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innovations grew out of a family of related appara-tusgalvanometers, self-registering chronographsand dynamometers used in ballistics, telegraphy,and practical physicsthat had been the subjectof an international priority dispute in the 1840s.

The original priority dispute gave rise to a sec-ond dispute among physiologists, pitting Helm-holtz and Du Bois-Reymond against the ItalianCarlo Matteucci on questions of animal electric-ity. The struggle pushed the physiologistsdeeper into the problems of instrumentation,with Helmholtz oscillating between experimentswith graphical recording instruments and anelectromagnetic method using a galvanometer.Helmholtz distrusted graphical methods as ameans for measuring the speed of nerve trans-mission because of concerns that friction would

distort the results. With advice from Carl-Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber, he deviseda nearly friction-free galvanometric method,which deflected muscle contractions into the de-flections of a needle through electromagneticforce. The deflections, read through a telescopeplaced a few meters away, yielded measures ofremarkable precision. But the results failed toconvince the key audience of the Paris academy,leading Helmholtz to return anew to the methodof curves as a means of convincing skeptics. Itwas this improved experimental setup thatproved triumphant in 1851. Schmidgens de-scriptions of all of these experimental systemsare exemplary; his account of the material tech-niques Helmholtz used to produce the perma-nent tracings is luminous.

But Schmidgens masterful treatment of themicro-context may have come at the expense ofthe meso-context. Perhaps because of his focuson Helmholtzs research after arriving in Koe-nigsberg in 1849, Schmidgen ignores Helm-holtzs interest, during his Berlin years, in cer-tain instruments involved in the first prioritydisputespecifically, the self-registering dyna-mometers of Morin and Poncelet that provided amodel for his first attempts to obtain a graphicalmeasure of the mechanical work expended inmuscle contraction. In Schmidgens account ofHelmholtzs graphical methods, the Berlin mo-ment appears to have been a kind of historicallatency period. It might also mark the losttime that links Helmholtzs physiological re-search with his famous 1847 physics treatise Onthe Conservation of Force, as well as the polit-ical and economic contexts of 1848, two long-standing desiderata of historical explanation.

Schmidgens Proustian subtitle, On theTrack of Lost Time, invokes the macro-contextual meaning of time and its measurementin the nineteenth-century scientific and cultural

imagination. Although Helmholtz and Proustnever met, Schmidgen suggests that the promi-nent appearance of the notion of temps perdu intheir work was no uncanny coincidence. Thescientist and the novelist were joined by path-

ways that made Helmholtzs methods into sta-ples of experimental psychologys investiga-tions of new perceptions, sensations, andthoughts, before Proust amplified them into aliterary technique that made lost time knowablethrough the creation and decipherment of signsor traces. Schmidgen interweaves bits of thebackground to Prousts novel into his narrative,reminding us how much of nineteenth-centuryart was underwritten by science, in particular byrecording instruments and related media.Schmidgens sophisticated use of Gaston

Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, and other thinkersmakes this often technical history of science asurprisingly good fit for a publisher best knownfor works by leading European philosophers andcultural theorists.

ROBERT M. BRAIN

Joel S. Schwartz. Darwins Disciple: GeorgeJohn Romanes, a Life in Letters. xxi 806 pp.,illus., app., bibl., index. Philadelphia: AmericanPhilosophical Society, 2010. $60 (paper).

George John Romanes (18481894) wasCharles Darwins research associate for the lasteight years of his life. Apart from the Darwinfamily, Romanes probably had more opportu-nity than anyone else to discuss evolution withthe master. Their extensive written correspon-dence is central to this volume. Many of theletters are in Ethel Romaness 1896 biographyof her husband, which ran to several editions,and in the 1932 biography of John T. Gulick byhis biochemist son, Addison.

The thinking of Romanes and Gulick, an

American missionary in Hawaii, on the impor-tance for branching evolution of some form ofisolation between groups within a species con-verged in the 1880s. They supported each otheragainst the attacks of the Darwinians, especiallyof Alfred Russel Wallace. The cogency of theirarguments was for long unrecognized.

In the first edition of her biography, EthelRomanes regretted that she had been unable toaccess the Gulick correspondence. Schwartznotes that this later became available to her butstill was not included in subsequent editions.

Yet some other late-arriving materials (e.g., cor-respondence with T. H. Huxley) were included,and other things that were present initially (e.g.,correspondence with the director of Kew Gar-

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