"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