The study of the history of science has only within the last few decades attained the rank of an important field of enquiry for both scientist and historian. It was thus almost inevitable that, at first, attention should have been focused on the great and original thinkers like Boyle, Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. But this type of approach frequently results in the presentation of a distorted picture, for few men are geniuses, and these are not truly representative of their age. The Irish scientists of the late seventeenth Century, who ranged from the very able to the pedantically dull, are far more typical examples of contemporary natural philosophers than are Newton or Boyle.

In 1680, science in Ireland was still a rare and infrequent study, and it must be admitted that the country had fallen behind the rest of Europe not only in the natural sciences but also in almost all other intellectual disciplines.

The great Anglo-Irish historian, W.E.H. Lecky, was born in Dublin in 1838. He is best remembered for his volumes on Ireland and England in the eighteenth century (begun in the 1870s and completed in the 1890s). His European reputation had already been made with his History of the rise and inpuence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe (1865), and his History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).

Contemporary printed sources for economic history begin to become numerous from the early eighteenth century. The wealth of this printed material as well as the survival of the rarer specimens of the literature only in scattered and in some instances unexpected locations make the task of the research worker or historian an arduous and time-consuming one. Moreover, except where there are separate chronological catalogues of collections it is difficult, especially in the larger libraries such as the British Museum and the National Library, Dublin, not to overlook many relevant items. A bibliography of this material was first projected by Henry Higgs as one of a series of companion volumes to his Bibliography of economics, 1751-1775, published in 1935. The volume recently edited by Mr Hansonl is a revision and expansion of the galley proof of Higgs’s unpublished volume for the period 1701-1750. Meeting a real need, it will be welcomed. Its aim is to ‘include every new English work on economic affairs’ in the first half of the eighteenth century. Its use will save researchers much laborious consultation of indexes, and will greatly facilitate the location of the rarer items, which are frequently available only in a single collection.