According to oft-repeated stereotypes, modern science is conducted in laboratories—spaces set aside from everyday life to more efficiently create reproducible knowledge about the world. If laboratory-based scientific practices were carefully designed to be place-independent, historian of science Robert E. Kohler explores sciences in the field that are so steeped in place that conclusions associated with one study were rarely generalized to another. He trains his attention on scientists who opted not for the power of experimentation and quantification but instead embraced open-ended observations and building up generalities from the accumulation of observed particulars.