Nicholas Wade takes a daring approach in this collection of documents from the history of optical studies. In it, he compiles a curiously structured anthology of writers, from the 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher Democritus to the 19th-century English musical instrument maker Charles Wheatstone, including such famous students of light and vision as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. These thinkers are grouped by theme ("Light and the Eye," for example, or "Space") and by date, but only very loosely by immediate subject, giving the book a hop-around feel. Wade freely admits that the organization of the anthology requires work of the reader; it may indeed call for effort, but his collection is of signal usefulness to students of the history of science and the optical sciences. --Gregory McNamee
Scientific American
...a sober, scholarly, handsome and rewarding book.
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