Here we have the second, concluding volume of Martin Rudwick's opus magnum, covering the crucial period that led from speculative ‘geotheory’ to the constitution of ‘geohistory’ – from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the mid-1840s, when a new vision of the earth and its history opened the dimension of prehistoric time, setting the scene for major innovations such as the establishment of evolutionary theory and human antiquity, and laying the foundations for the present-day earth sciences. To study these decades in full detail as the complex juncture when biology, geology and palaeontology received their names, took form as disciplines and attracted some of the most brilliant minds in the whole of Europe is a daunting enterprise. Rudwick achieves it masterfully.

His first volume, Bursting the Limits of Time (Chicago, 2005), disentangled the concepts, models and practices through which, at the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of a history of the earth was formed, as distinct from the previous, mostly speculative, accounts of its origin and formation. This second volume, Worlds before Adam, focuses on a later period, between 1820 and 1845, and on the history of a problem: the possibility of reconstructing the history of the earth as a succession of extinct ‘worlds’ through the determination of geological periods and palaeontological stratigraphy. This involved such important questions as the nature of causality and the ‘engine’ of geological processes, the evaluation of deep time and the transformations of living beings.

The architecture of this monumental book rests on two main pillars: the French Georges Cuvier and the British Charles Lyell. Cuvier established the bases of vertebrate palaeontology and, through stratigraphic palaeontology, the narrative framework for the succession of extinct worlds. He dominated the scientific scene until his death in 1832. Lyell then became a pivotal figure, indeed the major authority in the field after the publication of his Principles of Geology (1830–3). Rudwick peoples his volume with many other finely drawn characters, placing them within their institutional and intellectual environments and enlightening the parts they played in the European network of collaborations, exchanges and translations through which geology came into being. He vividly portrays British scientific actors such as Conybeare, de la Bèche, Whewell and the young Charles Darwin (then a geologist); French savants such as Adolphe Brongniart, Constant Prévost, Elie de Beaumont, Cordier and Deshayes; the international figure of Ami Boué; the Swiss Louis Agassiz; and German men of science including Von Hoff and Von Buch.

Rudwick recalls, almost day by day, the intense discussions over geological categories. But he also insists on the practices involved in this inquiry, and on the necessity for the science historian to replicate them: thus he reports on his own experiences walking in the footsteps of Lyell in Auvergne and on Etna, of Agassiz in the Swiss glaciers, and of Conybeare and de la Bèche on the shore of Lyme Regis. He carefully examines the interweaving of individual positions and collective debates, of publications and their reception in the scientific community as well as in the public. He also unfolds the institutional, political, social, religious and economic contexts in which they took shape: the impact of the political events of 1830 on the shaping of French geological institutions; the economic issues linked to coal mining and how they were involved in the British efforts to establish a stratigraphy of the Secondary era; the importance of religious issues in geological discussions, such as debates over the notion of ‘Diluvium’, from Buckland to Conybeare and Sedgwick. Rudwick devotes his last three chapters to glacial theory, the abandonment of reference to the biblical deluge and the introduction of contingency into thinking about the earth and its history.

As he addresses the debates which flourished all through the period, Rudwick refuses to adopt traditional dichotomies (catastrophism versus uniformitarism, transformism versus fixism, creationism versus materialism) generally used by science historians, which he claims render neither the complexity of issues nor the subtlety of individual positions. Thus religious thinkers such as Sedgwick and Agassiz were able to accept the notion of life's progress, while the anti-clerical Lyell long denied it, supporting, after Hutton, the idea of a cyclical return in the history of the earth and of life.

The question of the antiquity of man is another focus. Rudwick brings new insights to the pioneering efforts in this area by analysing a number of rarely read primary sources, including works by Christol, Marcel de Serres, Tournal and Schmerling. He surprisingly omits the picturesque figure of Jacques Boucher de Perthes, a French customs officer and president of the Société d'émulation d'Abbeville, whose field explorations in the Lower Valley of the Somme river started in 1842, and who was later to play a crucial role in the international recognition of ‘fossil man’. Another notable omission, among so many pages devoted to stratigraphic palaeontology and geology, is Alcide d'Orbigny, a disciple of Cuvier whose major works in palaeontological stratigraphy started in the early 1840s and, if mainly published near the end of the decade, certainly belonged to the epistemic configuration depicted here.

For almost forty years, Martin Rudwick has demonstrated remarkable intellectual agility, not only in ‘reinventing himself’ (such as from a professional palaeontologist into a science historian), but also in renewing thoroughly a whole domain of studies. Worlds before Adam is at once an important synthesis, a brilliant essay which bestows an immense scholarship upon an original and well-carried argument, and an elegantly written and composed book as pleasant to read as a novel. It will also stand as a reference book, easy to consult by anyone professionally or personally interested in geology and palaeontology and their historical and epistemological implications. With summaries at the end of each chapter, internal references between the different parts, detailed footnotes on scientific issues at stake in the debates, 157 carefully reproduced plates and a good index, the volume is an excellent instrument of inquiry. But far from being an encyclopedic summa, it is also a profoundly personal work which radiates the world and personality of its author, one of the most learned and incisive minds in our profession.