Ingenious Persuits was a poorly arranged book. When I started reading the book I imagined that it would be a rather dull British textbook about the history of British Science. Once I got into the book though I found that I enjoyed many parts of it. There were a lot of very strange things that science did in the past. The worst part of the book was simply the way that it was arranged and written. There was no logical order to the book configuration. There was a rough topical structure where ideas were mentioned in groups, but even this did not always hold true. Chapter to chapter the book would trade topics and styles in a seemly random way that could have only been designed to actually confuse the reader.
Though this chaos almost the entire book Longitude was actually repeated in the first few chapters. After that the reader is plunged into the world of botany, opium, and geography that made up British Science through the 17th and 18th centuries.
My favorite parts of the book where the really strange bits of science that were explained in the most mundane way.
For example when Boyle essentially tied his dog down, opened him up, and shot him up with opium because he thought that would help him understand the inner workings of the lungs.
Also when Leeuwenhoek, a minor city official, who spoke only Low Dutch and had absolutely no scientific schooling at all, did things with microscopes that baffled the Royal Society and were for a long time unreproducible.
On the upside the book will make a great reference. It has an amazing index. Also even more important it has a really great cast of characters section in the back. It lists all of the major players through out the time period with a bio of when they were born and what they were famous for.
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