Complete and unabridged, with 40 full-page plates by William Trost Richards, Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. Physical science told as a succession of discoveries: Archimedes in the bath, Galileo's pendulum, Torricelli's tube, Newton's prism, Franklin's kite, Faraday's ring and the electric spark. E. E. Fournier d'Albe was a physicist who invented an early reading machine for the blind. His argument in the preface — that descriptive science matters as much as laboratory drill — is the reason the book reads well. Forty plates of nineteenth-century landscape painting by Turner, Church and their contemporaries run alongside the text, matching the book's wonder at natural forces with skies, mountains and light.