Literature and science: no longer two cultures? Back in the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn headed us toward this conclusion when he emphasized how deeply science was embedded in culture in The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962). Since then, both cultural and literary analysts have theorized about just how literary texts actualize cultural assumptions, including those of science (Michael Riffaterre, “Flaubert's Presuppositions,” Diacritics 11: 2–11). Science offers but one of a number of competing discourses within a culture (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989); authors — of all sorts — are free to reconstruct any of them, and both science and literature realize culture. I draw the verb, “realize,” from Gillian Beer, whose book Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter offers the occasion for this review. Beer's book reprints fourteen masterful essays that delineate ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific ideas have been realized. Beer chooses her verb carefully. Scientists, she suggests, are no different from other purveyors of ideas; they never know whom their work will influence or whose ends it will serve. Helmholtz can, for example, turn up in a poem by Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are always to understand that the cultural encounter between science and society moves in both directions and that any culture can provide striking correspondences. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, scientific hunts for missing links evolved concurrently with the sleuthing of literary detectives.