Dissections of Love and Death : VARIOUS ANTIDOTES: Stories, <i> By Joanna Scott (Henry Holt: $20; 240 pp.)</i>

The Cambridge University Museum of Zoology houses the enormous skeleton of an African bull elephant shot in 1884 by a Mr. W. Heape of Trinity College. Surrounding it march the bones of extinct and still-living species, all collected before 1900, jumbled together and apparently arranged by size rather than habitat or species. Wooly mammoths, giant 20-foot sloths, killer whales and tiny vertebrates such as shrews and mule deer and mole rats, all glare at the visitor through their century-old hollow eye sockets.

Joanna Scott’s absorbing and entertaining collection of short stories bears a remarkable likeness to this museum display. Discoveries of bee habits, lenses, chloroform and a lab worker with the gene for Huntington’s Chorea people these 11 examinations of men and women who examine the human race.

But science, to many readers, can be dull, so I should say straight off that although Scott uses science as a scaffold for these gripping vignettes, the majority are really about love and death.

Almost everyone in these stories is in love, and death is frequent. No fewer than 26 executions take place. Though most are of people, one is of the celebrated Coney Island elephant Topsy who was executed around 1910 by public electrocution, for mauling too many caretakers. All these executed characters, whether they die literally or figuratively, are loved. Even Topsy.

Charlotte Corday’s nameless female cousin, a cook, loved Charlotte to distraction; she mourns her young cousin through rhapsodies on the legendary onion sauce she used to cook for the girl before Charlotte was so insane as to go off to Paris and murder Marat. Afraid for her own life if her anti-revolutionary grief goes public, the cook confines herself to the grand gesture of never making the sauce again.

A family of body snatchers who provide corpses for anatomy classes get themselves executed because they lose patience with one healthy young specimen; after all, he only needed a little strangling to make him salable. Yet they love each other even as they watch one another be hanged and wait for their own turns at the noose.

Van Leeuvenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, takes his loving daughter so for granted that his endearments for the flies he dissects carry more emotion than his words for her. His incestuous embrace is enough to produce from her the tear he needs to study under his remarkable lens.

As varied and beautifully imagined as many of these scenes are, and as meticulously researched (at least they seem that way, which is what counts in historical fiction), a few effects are repeated enough to reach sameness. Dorothea Dix, a champion for the maltreated insane women of the 19th Century, begins to sound in her late-life ramblings not too different from the solitary old woman bewitched by the elephant’s electrocution. The bee master, the childbirth expert and the hypnotist’s ex-lover all seem to have their grudges against the world. Musings of badly understood genius don’t bear much repetition.

A highlight of Scott’s gifts, on the other hand, is her repeated knack of slowing down death. If it weren’t so well done it would be easier to bear. At the Place de la Concorde, mashed against the sweating, shocked cook, we see the guillotine’s slow descent to Charlotte Corday’s neck. When mice are “tumbled” to death in a revolving drum as a scientific study of falling bodies, the spilled cedar chips and mouse pellets crunch under our shoes.

This grim super-realism may reflect Scott’s absorption with the pathos and solitude of an exploring mind, and can serve to ask the question of how possible it is to exist as a thinking human in anything except a solitary state. Whatever their literary purpose, all those deaths were heavy going, despite their fanciful reframing and the supposed remoteness of history. This very remoteness could perhaps have made the deaths unreal, when in fact it rendered them eternal.

Like the comprehensively arranged skeletons waiting forever in the zoology museum, these episodes wait to be read, examined and revisited.