History of science at the used book store

I have a minor interest in how scientific discoveries are made and another minor interest in the history of sciences, especially biology. The 2 interests are necessarily connected, for if one knows the history of a particular science, then it is easier to understand how the major discoveries in that field were made and vice versa.

I was, therefore, delighted last weekend when I visited my usual used bookstore and found 4 relevant books.

They were J.D. Bernal's The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions (1965), The Evolution of Biology by M. J. Sirks & C. Zirkle (1964), Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) and Willy Ley's Dawn of Zoology (1968).

The only one I had heard of before was Kuhn's book. But the most expensive among them being merely for $3, it would have been a shame to leave anyone behind and so I bought them all. Now I have to find time to go thru them, perhaps by skim reading.

Whatever interesting and useful ideas and facts I can distill out of the books are likely to be subjects of future posts.