"This biography is an extensive revision of the authors' earlier Cavendish. Based upon new archival and secondary sources, it offers an enlarged understanding of the eighteenth-century world of science, a reevaluation of the person of Henry Cavendish, and the first, and complete, edition of Henry Cavendish's scientific letters."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Cavendishes flourished during the high tide of British aristocracy following the revolution of 1688-89, and the case can be made that this aristocracy knew its finest hour when Henry Cavendish gently laid his delicate weights in the pan of his incomparable precision balance. For this it took two generations and two kinds of invention, one in social forms and the other in scientific technique. This biography tells how it came to pass."--BOOK JACKET.