As Peter Medawar said in a review of James Watson's The Double Helix, while it is all very well being clever when it comes to non-scientific subjects, scientists "have something important to be clever about." As a non-scientist, I might have expected to take umbrage at this remark, but Medawar's remark is both cheeky and funny  and, if you look at it one way, right.

It also demonstrates, as this book mostly does, that being a scientist doesn't mean you can't write elegant or fascinating prose. (I wish I had more space to quote some more of Medawar's entries.) The scientific view, in fact, can produce the kind of narrative perspective that few conventional fiction writers can manage. You have to have quite a robust way of looking at things to be able to describe, as does JBS Haldane, in one of the most memorable phrases I have ever read, the effects of a fall of a thousand yards down a mine-shaft: "A mouse ... gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." (Haldane's also in here with the comic poem he wrote after his treatment for rectal cancer, which included a colostomy: "So now I am like two-faced Janus / The only god who sees his anus ... My final word, before I'm done, / Is 'Cancer can be rather fun'.")

Haldane knew perfectly well how arresting he was being, and, as Medawar said, he "could have made a success of any one of half a dozen careers", but you have the feeling that it is the necessary absorption of the scientist, such as that of Niko Tinbergen, who painted tiny spots of paint on digger wasps so he could learn more about their behaviour, that produces such observations as "From members of the species Philanthus triangulum they were transformed into personal acquaintances." Richard Fortey wrote a book called Trilobite!, perhaps the best use of an exclamation mark in the history of publishing, and the extract included here informs us that the eyes of the extinct animals were composed of calcite, and if you don't think that's even a tiny bit interesting, then poor you.

With only one or two exceptions (I confess that my eyes glazed over somewhat when reading about logarithmic spirals  but not entirely so) this is very much an eye-opening book, and Richard Dawkins has done a wonderful job. It is divided into four sections: What Scientists Are, What Scientists Study, What Scientists Think, and What Scientists Delight In, but these sections seem a little arbitrary and, indeed, from the way they write about what they like, it would seem that the existence, the study, the thought and the delight are all tightly bound up with one another. (Not that we should necessarily come away with the idea of scientists as warm, dedicated and selfless creatures. Max F Perutz says of Dorothy Hodgkin that "the warmth and gentleness of her approach to people uncovered in everyone, even the most hardened scientific crook, some hidden kernel of goodness".)

This book is by no means for scientists only: it's a showcase for the benefit of those who may be sceptical about their finer or deeper feelings. You may, for instance, be surprised to read Albert Einstein meditating on religion, particularly in an anthology edited by Dawkins, and you may disagree that "in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people," but their sense of wonder at the universe (if there is a bias in this book it is skewed towards Dawkins's discipline, biology) is infectious and genuine.

He has done very well to show that although scientists have to use scientific language when dealing, at the most involved end, with their subjects, when they talk to us they use language that can be clear, evocative and passionate. And, without invoking the spirit of Gradgrind in any way, this is a book that celebrates the astounding variety and nature of facts. It gets to the point where there seems to be something mystical about them after all.