REVIEW EXAMINING THE HOW AND WHY OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (eds), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. 230. US$25.00 PB By Chad Gonnerman This collection of nine essays plus an introduction started life as a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in 2001. But the collection is not aimed exclusively at historians of science. It ranges from the literary uses of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in ancient Indian Sanskrit texts (Wendy Doniger’s contribution) to the epistemic nature of the justifications needed for literal anthropomorphism in contemporary sciences of animal behaviour (Sandra Mitchell’s contribution), a range that covers dif- ferent anthropomorphisms with regard to time, place, and purpose. Since my space is limited, I shall focus on those contributions that I think will match the interests of the science-studies community, which still leaves us with seven excellent essays. The book’s first section looks at some of the history of human– animal issues. Here, we find Paul White’s nuanced examination of Victorian debates over vivisection. Unlike many classic histories of the period, like Harriet Ritvo’s, which tend to reinforce the thought that anthropomorphic sentimentalism affected only the antivivisec- tionists, a response that they felt for all laboratory animals, White points out that the historical record is actually much more compli- cated. First, not all animals elicited an emotional response. Frogs, for instance, had few defenders. Second, scientists often had to fight their own emotional outpourings on behalf of the laboratory animals, a phenomenon well known to both sides of the debate as evidenced by their disputes over the effects that such suppression may have for one’s moral character. This section also includes Lorraine Daston’s comparison of the anthropomorphisms of the Metascience (2008) 17:419–423 Ó Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s11016-008-9231-0