Dimand wrote: But of course truncated influences are, if anything, harder to trace than influences which actually continued to convey their germ down academic generations! I disagree: I take as my text Bruno Latour who argued that "The status of a statement depends on later statements. It is made more of a certainty or less of a certainty depending on the next sentence that takes it up; this retrospective attribhution is repeated for this next new sentence, which in turn might be more of a fact or more of a fiction by a third, and so on...Since the staus of a claim depends on later user's insertions, what if there are no later users whatsoever? This is the point that people who never come close to the fabrication of science have the greatest difficulty in grasping. They imagine that all scientific articles are equal and are arrayed in lines like soldiers, to be carefully inspected one by one. However most papers are never read at all. No matter what a paper did to the former literature, if no one else does anything else with it, then it is as if it had never existed at all. You may have written a paper that settles a fierce controversy once and for all, but if readers ignore it it cannot be turned into a fact; it simply cannot." (Bruno Latour, Science in Action, 1897, 27-28, 40) Put simply in the present context, precursor searches, among dead white females' writings on economics, specifically writings which had no effect on the subdisciplinary community of scholars, have no narrative power. They may be of interest as rational reconstructions of the history, or as historical reconstructions of the local and contingent circumstances of the construction of the writings themselves, but we all are, by now, aware of the historiographic deadend of such rational reconstructions of the development of science. That is, to argue Harriet Martineau did or did not discover X for the first time but economics had to wait N years for X to be rediscoved is to misconceive the enterprise of doing economics itself. A story of Martineau and her discussion of X is or can be interesting and excellent history, but precursor hunts are simply a reminder that "There is no new thing under the sun" well known since Ecclesiastes, about B.C 977. E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics Duke University, Box 90097 Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097 Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838 Fax: (919) 684-8974 E-mail: [log in to unmask] Web Site: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html