It has been said that baseball players get so much grief over their inflated salaries - more than their basketball and football counterparts - because the average fan secretly believes that fielding grounders and hitting .250 is not, truth be told, all that difficult. Editors of all kinds, but particularly editors of anthologies, are similarly open to criticism from anyone who is reasonably well-read and has an opinion as to why one piece of writing is better or more significant than another. That these activities require significantly more skill than is at first apparent - just ask anyone who has spent a few minutes in a batting cage - is important to remember when deciding whether or not they have been done well.

The editor in question is Edmund Blair Bolles, and the anthology he has compiled and edited is called Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing. Bolles does have one distinct advantage in preparing this volume, which is that the shelves of your local bookseller are not crammed with historical collections of scientific prose meant for a general audience. The only recent anthology that rivals Galileo's Commandment in spirit and scope is John Carey's Eyewitness to Science (Harvard University Press, 1995). Furthermore, he is unlikely to offend anyone in the academy, since, unlike their colleagues in the English department, scientists do not spend much time or energy defending (or attacking) a universally accepted canon of great science writing. While there are a few choices that would be expected to appear on anyone's list of favorites, there is still enough unheralded material out there to assemble dozens of unique anthologies that plausibly could be called "great."

How was Galileo's Commandment put together? In the introduction, Bolles explains that the title is taken from Bertolt Brecht's play The Life of Galileo, in which Galileo (the character) says, "Science knows only one commandment: contribute to science." Bolles elaborates:

For the most part, Bolles's preference is for professional scientists, or, at the very least, people with significant background and training in science (Ernst Mach, Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, Charles Darwin, James Maxwell, and Marie Curie, to name a few). There are also essays from observers of science (Isaac Asimov, Karl Popper, John McPhee, Richard Preston, and Rachel Carson). The emphasis is on selections in which the writer uses a new observation to elucidate a general scientific principle for the first time, or explains a widely accepted scientific principle to a general audience. Thus we read many passage of undoubted historical interest. Some of these are beautifully written and bear the unmistakable signature of, in Bolles's words, "an active, probing mind" at the moment in which an unprecedented thought takes shape. These thoughts are then skillfully poured onto the page, the excitement and portent surrounding the idea still present for anyone to read and experience. Others, unfortunately, seem to have been included despite the fact that the prose is not particularly memorable - writing about great scientific ideas, rather than great science writing.

There are several examples of the superior kind. Jean Piaget, in an excerpt from his Judgement and Reasoning in the Child, describes in perfectly clear prose the evidence for discrete stages in the development of formal reasoning in children. Marie Curie in Pierre Curie describes, in passages begging to be put on film, the hard-won rewards of the exhausting efforts through which she and her husband first isolated radium from the residues of processed pitchblende: "One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights." And in the most lyrical essay in the collection, Louise Young describes the impact of ice ages on the Earth's climate and evolution, adding her firm understanding of geology and meteorology to eloquent nature writing in the tradition of other contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Gretel Ehrlich. It is to Bolles's credit that these selections have been included, along with more obvious choices such as the essays by Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Feynman.

But it is difficult to say the same for some of the other choices. Alfred Wegener's undoubtedly strong arguments for his revolutionary theory of continental drift will strike most readers more as a cleverly arranged recitation of geological observations than as a great piece of writing. The same can be said for the excerpt from George Smoot's Wrinkles in Time, his account of the Cosmic Background Explorer program and the search for temperature variations in the background radiation that is the residue of the Big Bang. Whatever the merits of Smoot's book as an account of the program and his team's landmark accomplishment, the few pages that we read in Galileo's Commandment seem not to capture the excitement that was generated when his discovery was announced in 1991. One can't help but wonder if another passage from the book might have been more appropriate, or if a few pages from a talented observer of cosmology like Timothy Ferris might have been a better choice. The best that can be said for some selections, like the passage from Horace Benedict De Saussure's 1796 book Travels in the Alps, is that they show thinkers holding a conversation across the centuries, as he and Louise Young do on the subject of the origins and impacts of glaciers on the Earth's surface.

Biology watchers will be pleased to know that their discipline is well represented by Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, William Bateson, Thomas and Julian Huxley, and other luminaries. Wallace's essay on natural selection is a pleasure to read, and Bolles is quite right to point out the contrast between Darwin's calm, measured tone and Wallace's enthusiastic writing style in which many phrases read as if italicized even when they are not. Among the missing biologists of note are - you see how tempting this is - Lewis Thomas, Erwin Chargaff, Francois Jacob, and Peter Medawar, each of whom might have been paired with another writer in the anthology. For example, the excerpt from James Watson's The Double Helix includes Watson's description of his unhappy meeting with the nucleic acid biochemist Chargaff, but Bolles misses the chance to include Chargaff's own famously dismissive view of Watson and Crick, delivered with great relish in his unforgettable memoir Heraclitean Fire: Sketches of a Life Before Nature.

All told, Galileo's Commandment is a mixed bag, with enough interesting and unexpected essays to make it worth leafing through for those who want to read more in the history of science. Those who most enjoy contemporary science writing and might have hoped for more should be encouraged by the appearance of two bulky anthologies (Carey's and Bolles's) in the last three years. Perhaps this trend will prompt the folks at Houghton Mifflin to consider adding a Best American Science Writing collection to their annual series of anthologies, thereby raising the profile of this important, if underappreciated, genre.

"Brain Candy" - a review of Galileo's Commandment from Discover magazine, by Jo Ann C. Gutin.

The Third Culture: Scientists on the Edge - John Brockman, the noted agent for so many of today's scientists who write for a general audience, outlines his view of science and its importance in intellectual life. Brockman also maintains a Web site, featuring many of his clients, devoted to online discussions.

HMS Beagle's Featured Essays include a number of outstanding examples of science writing, and BioMedNet offers for sale Sydney Brenner's mischievous Loose Ends, a collection of witty commentaries on science as we know it at the end of the twentieth century.

Peter Medawar - online samples of the immunologist's writing.

NaturalSCIENCE: Essays - a scientific Webzine includes an archive of science writing.