Richard Olson is Professor of History of Science and Willard W. Keith Fellow in the Humanities at Harvey Mudd College and Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. He studied physics and the history of science at Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D. His special interests include British natural philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relationship among religion, political ideology, and scientific activity in Western cultures from antiquity to the present. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, his publications include Science as Metaphor (1971), Scottish Philosophy and British Physics (1975), and two volumes of the magisterial Science Deified and Science Defied, on the influence of science on Western culture. Professor Olson has just recently completed a path-breaking work on the history of the social sciences entitled The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792.