The J.H.B. Bookshelf J.H.B. Bookshelf Board: Mark Barrow, Joel B. Hagen Lynn K. Nyhart coordinator Joy Harvey Ronald Rainger Keith R. Benson Sharon E. Kingsland Jan Sapp Paula Findlen Jane Maienschein Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis Deborah Fitzgerald Gregg Mitmann Martin J. S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xiii + 280 pp., $45.00. For many of us inhabiting the world of the late twentieth century it is hard to imagine a world without deep time. From now-classic films like Walt Disney's Fantasia, to television programs like Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the popular writings of Stephen Jay Gould, as well as the ever-popular displays lining the halls of natural history museums across the world, awareness of the immensity of the prehistoric time scale and our own later appearance are so constitutive of our culture that belief in deep time is largely taken for granted. Martin Rudwick's Scenes from Deep Time serves as a reminder of a world in the process of recognizing the vast expanse of its own prehistory. "Deep time" - a phrase borrowed from John McPhee's Basin and Range (1981) - expresses the especially unimaginable magnitude of this time scale; "Scenes" refers to the book's focus on attempts to pictorially represent the enormity of this time scale and the sequences of events that gave rise to the origin of the world and of life, and the appearance of the first humans. The pictorial representation of deep time, as Rudwick points out, raises a special set of problems. Unlike lived time, or historic time, deep time denotes a prehuman and preobservational moment. Without human eyes to witness scenes of origin, the imaging (as well imagining) of these scenes is an especially critical problem. Given this problem, one way that finished scenes of deep time function is to make visible what is invisible, and to give the illusion that the viewer can become witness to what is actually unseeable. Borrowing a notion from the influential Leviathan and the Air- Pump (1985) by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Rudwick argues that scenes of deep time thus serve (and served) to make Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 26, no. 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 571-587. 9 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.