Fossils and reputations

The correspondence between Igino Cocchi and his teacher Giuseppe Meneghini in the 1850s gives historians an unrivalled opportunity to sample the lively scientific arguments and candid gossip of a network of geologists and palaeontologists - centred on Paris and London but spread throughout Europe - in the last decade before these sciences began to yield cultural prestige to prehistory and evolutionary biology. Pietro Corsi's superb edition of these letters, with its substancial introduction in English (including extended quotations in translation), will help historians to regain the pan-European perspective of the mid-century scientific world.