Charles Coulston Gillispie is Dayton-Stockton Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, where he founded the program in History and Philosophy of Science in 1960. His books include "The Edge of Objectivity; Lazare Carnot Savant; The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation; Pierre-Simon Laplace: A Life in Exact Science"; and "Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime" (all Princeton). He was also the editor of the "Dictionary of Scientific Biography" (16 volumes, 1970-1980). In 1997, he was awarded the Balzan Prize in the History and Philosophy of Science.

• *FrontMatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. vii*Preface, pg. ix*A Note on the Citations, pg. xi*Chapter I. The State And Science, pg. 3*Chapter II. Science and the State, pg. 74*Chapter III. Science and Medicine, pg. 187*CHAPTER IV. Scientists and Charlatans, pg. 257*CHAPTER V. Trades and Agriculture, pg. 335*CHAPTER VI. Industry and Invention, pg. 388*CHAPTER VII. Engineering, Civil and Military, pg. 479*Conclusion, pg. 549*Bibliography, pg. 553*Index, pg. 579

Winner of the Pfizer Award,History of Science Society "[A] learned and absorbing book... In both conception and execution, it is a work on the grand scale."--Nature "This is an authoritative book by one of our leading historians of science... Written in a stately style and rich in archival and documentary evidence, it will be a source of pleasure and profit to students of French science for many years to come."--Science "An enormously elaborate interweaving of many threads of detail, political, scientific, personal... Its expression is fluent and vivid. It is a very scholarly book, but it is no arid presentation of past events, it is alive... This is history as it is rarely written, and the book is wonderful."--Quarterly Review of Biology