Trevor H. Levere is a professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Annals of Science, and author or editor of a dozen books, of which the most recent are Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and Conversations about Chemistry and Steam: Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society, 1780-1787, which he coedited with Gerard L’Estrange Turner (Oxford University Press, 2002).