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. Ingenious Pursuits focuses on a series of virtuoso advancements -- among them the discovery of the circulation of blood, the perfection of the mechanical clock, enhanced astronomical observation, fundamental developments in mathematics, selective animal and plant breeding, and the development of chemical substance analysis -- that transformed the thinking of the early modern world and inaugurated forces for change that laid the very foundations for modern thought. - Jacket flap.