THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
555
logue of the arts and metiers of the nation. The best scientist of his day,
Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, was charged with the official task:
Reaumur had invented the thermometer, was a dazzling mathematician,
and stood astride the physical sciences. Three score years passed without
a publication. The contest began when in
1747,
Diderot and the Abbe
Gua de Malves signed on with a commercial publisher for a new ency–
clopedia based on
Chamber's Encyclopedia
of London. Diderot had cut
his teeth on the non-profitable
Dictionnaire de medecine
(1746);
he now
assembled his fellow
philosophes
as La Societe de Gens de Lettres
to
pre–
pare and distribute the more ambitious
Encyclopedie
to subscribers,
among them the gentry of Enlightenment Europe. By
1751,
the first vol–
ume of Diderot's
Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des
arts et des metiers
was issued, with a promise to subscribers that an
appendix of plates would soon be forthcoming. By
1759
not one fascicle
of the Academy's plates had been published, although some had been
engraved and many more drawn. That year, Diderot and crew started
their own efforts at engraving, having looked over some of the Academy's
plates as possible models. But, one of Diderot's disgruntled workmen
accused Diderot of taking seventy-seven plates from Reaumur's advance
proofs, and the Academy sent a commission to scour Diderot's premises.
They found at least forty of Reaumur's unpublished plates, and made
Diderot agree to show the Academy each of his own new plates before
publication to make sure that none were filched from the Reaumur set.
None, indeed, were and the two sides published the first volume of plates
simultaneously in the winter of
176112.
Bottom line-public effort:
eighty-seven years for plates and text; private effort: ten years for the
plates, four years for the text. Speed mattered in the Enlightenment as the
Encyclopedie
became the
machine de guerre
of reductionist science.
Nowadays in our country and our culture, Enlightenment science faces
opposition from the political right and left; both share a faith-based fear
of science. The admirers of nature, eco-sentimentalists, like Bill McK–
ibben with his
The End of Nature
and devotees of natural limits, like
John Horgan with his
The End of Science,
are joined by those the
New
York Times
(March
27,2002)
called "Unlikely Allies Against Cloning."
The changes engendered by genetic engineering ... could force us
to reconsider liberalism's faith in the onward march of science. This
message was made clear last week when a broad coalition of envi–
ronmentalists, feminists, and other progressives released an open
letter urging the Senate to ban reproductive cloning and to place a
moratorium on therapeutic cloning.... At one such rally of envi-
