Today the two cultures of "art" and "science" have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed, their aims incompatible. In this remarkable book, Lisa Jardine makes clear that this distinction is both artificial and historically inaccurate. The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and practical inventiveness. Isaac Newton was as fascinated with the chemical processes involved in the transmutation of metals as he was with the movements of the planets. John Locke was as keen a physician and botanist as he was a philosopher. Christopher Wren pursued anatomical dissections and early blood transfusion with the same vigor as he did architecture. These men--among others--opened their minds to the widest possible influences, allowing for huge and brilliant leaps of imagination, for the ingenuity, quick-wittedness, lateral thinking, and inspired guesswork that we now associate with the humanities, not the sciences. But what unified their activities was a genius for technological innovation, for combining the workings of the hand and the brain in one continuous creative process. And it is this that marks the emergence of a distinctive, modern Western Intellectual Tradition. Ingenious Pursuitsfocuses on a series of virtuoso advancements--among them the discovery of the circulation of blood, the perfec