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