FIRST §: THIS EXCHANGE WITH PROFESSOR HUFF brings to mind the time-honoured Arabic adage about the goat that remains a “goat, even if it flies,” which is often used to refer to people who retain their opinions despite being shown evidence to the contrary. In my review article on his book, The Rise of Early Modern Science,1 I tried to take each of the constituting hypotheses that Professor Huff proposes for the rise of modern science and find either a counter-example or a corrective fact that might sharpen the arguments in a book that I essentially liked. But Professor Huff has apparently taken offence at my well-intentioned critique, going so far as to accuse me of “defensiveness” and of “oppos[ing] the idea that past and present human communities, institutions, governments and so on ought to grant greater freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their participants” (emphasis mine). It seems that I touched a raw nerve, one that may best be characterized as Western chauvinism, since I prefer not to use his own term, “triumph”-alism. And I feel the urgent necessity of clearing my name before he goes on to accuse me of a lack of patriotism, as is quickly becoming the fashion these days.