NEW BOOK: "On the Organic Law of Change" by James T. Costa

This morning I received a new book ready for review: On the Organic Law of Change: A Facsimile Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfred Russel Wallace's Species Notebook of 1855-1859 by Jim Costa.

I have been looking forward to getting my hands on a copy for review. Wallace's species notebooks were the field notebooks which Wallace wrote during his time in the Malay Archipelago (1854-1862). Of course, this period of his life is now immortalised due to it being the period in which he independently co-discovered the theory of natural selection with Darwin in 1858.

Book Review: "Alfred Russel Wallace's 1886–1887 Travel Diary: The North American Lecture Tour" edited by Charles H. Smith and Megan Derr

I have just had a new book review of published in the December 2013 volume of British Journal for the History of Science (vol. 46, no. 4).*

It is of the excellent Alfred Russel Wallace's 1886–1887 Travel Diary: The North American Lecture Tour edited by Charles H. Smith and Megan Derr which has recently been published by the Siri Scientific Press.

It is a truly wonderful book which brings to life Wallace's travel diary written during his 10 month lecture tour in the USA and Canada.

Importantly, it is not only of interest to those studying Alfred Russel Wallace but also for those interested in the history and reception of Darwinism in America, the history of botany, geology and various other sciences as well as general American social history as Wallace often makes comments about America in the late 1880s.

Book Review: "Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930" by Christine Ferguson

I have just had a book review published in the British Journal for the History of Science.*

It is Christine Ferguson's excellent Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 published by Edinburgh University Press.

For those of you working in the area of occult studies it is a very interesting book. Similarly for those interested in eugenics theory, racial, spiritualism and more besides in (chiefly) the nineteenth-century it is filled with valuable insights.