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Here is a two-volume encyclopedia with 2000 entries on more than 1000
pages, taking us from Thales of Miletus in the 7th century BC right up to
the 1990s. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs, edited by John Daintith,
Sarah Mitchell, Elizabeth Tootill and Derek Gjertson (Institute Of Physics
Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, pp 1075, £120), embraces engineers
on the one hand and selected philosophers on the other under the appropriately
broad umbrella of ‘science’. Its 2500-year overview takes in scientific
people and, more importantly, their ideas.

But it’s a hard life being an encyclopedist. As the editors bemoan in
their preface: ‘the most difficult problem was compiling the entry list
. . . in view of the fact that of all scientists who have ever lived, the
vast majority are still alive’. Tricky indeed.

Among the dead, it is good to see railway man George Stephenson, road
pioneer John Loudon McAdam and bridge builder Thomas Telford. But, as the
Channel Tunnel hits the front pages, whatever happened to Isambard Kingdom
Brunel? Similarly, all the Leakeys are properly included among the palaeo-anthropologists,
plus the pioneers Rene Dubois, Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, theorist David
Pilbeam, and Don Johanson as the finder of ‘Lucy’, the skeleton of an early
hominid Australo-pithicus afarensis. But where is Philip Tobias, the co-discoverer
of Homo habilis, the oldest of the human genus? I kept asking, as I suppose
everyone is bound to do, ‘How come that dipstick so and so is in – and where
is the dazzling so and so?’

My only serious quibble is the editors’ reluctance to get the story
into the first paragraph. Take an entry at random: George Wald won his Nobel
prize for work on the chemistry of vision (excellently described), but the
two-line blurb that heads the piece tells us merely that Wald is an ‘American
biochemist’ and his entry begins, as is the invariable style of the book,
‘Wald was educated at New York University and at Columbia’. Similarly, the
first we are told of Charles Doolittle Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess
Shale, is that he ‘was born in a poor family and was educated at Utica public
schools’. The entries do get to the meat, but these plonking intros make
it harder to browse, and browsing is one of the pleasures of a good reference
book.

But this is a very good reference book. If you have anything to do with
running libraries, or have £120 to spare, then it is one to buy.