Terra Incognita. Alain Corbin

matches a clear trend shared by other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant and the early geologists Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Jean-Louis Giraud-Soulavie. The imaginary of grand geological timescales that rose to prominence in the decade between 1760 and 1770 is one of the fundamental aspects of the representation of earth’s history and morphology. It is impossible to measure how far it extended across the social spectrum, as I suggested at the start of this chapter. Nonetheless, it was the most significant difference in the beliefs of Buffon and his contemporaries and represents the starting point for a decisive stratification between the haves and have-nots of knowledge.

For a measure of this complexity, we now turn to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature, published in 1784, a wide-ranging book that was still shaped by a belief in the impact of the Flood, and more broadly in Providentialism, proclaimed at the same time by Bernard Nieuwentijdt’s Het regt gebruik der werelt beschouwingen, ter overtuiginge van ongodisten en ongelovigen [translated into English as The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator] and Noël-Antoine Pluche’s Spectacle de la nature [Spectacle of Nature]. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre opened with a critique of the hypothesis that the earth was originally molten. He also argued that the sea could not have formed mountain ranges, since it could never have risen to such a level: it had been repeatedly noted since Antiquity that God had set an invisible marker on coastlines that the sea could not pass. In short, the earth’s history was entirely shaped by God’s word.

      Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s views on the poles, tides, currents and sea ice are sometimes strikingly accurate, suggesting his ideas are not to be dismissed out of hand. To the modern reader, they are at odds with his flights of lyricism on the impact of Noah’s Flood. Though there is little direct evidence of his influence, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s renown suggests that many people may have been swayed by his view ascribing ‘the general deluge to a total effusion of the polar ices’,⁸ combined with water falling from the clouds and melting from mountain ice caps. He dismisses the cataracts of the ‘great abyss’ in favour of a more scientific vision. For Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the cataclysm was caused by the sun drifting temporarily from its elliptical course, setting the polar regions aflame:

      Then all the plans of Nature were reversed. Islands of floating ice, loaded with white bears, ran aground among the palm-trees of the torrid zone, and the elephants of Africa were tossed amidst the fir-groves of Siberia, where their large bones are still found to this day. […] At the sight of the disorder reigning in the heavens, man, in despair, despaired of the safety of the earth. […] Every thing was swallowed up by the waters: there remained on the earth no trace of glory and felicity of the human race, in those days of vengeance, when Nature involved in one ruin all the monuments of her greatness.⁹

The cascading waters roared into the Atlantic, where they triggered dreadful tides, spreading ‘vast beds of shells’ and forcing ‘counter-tides’. This, he claims, is how expanses of sedimentary deposits came to be formed. The Biblical reference to a flood lasting forty days seems to match the timescale of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s vision of the polar ice caps melting away entirely. After 150 days, the waters once again froze at the poles and land once more emerged from the waves. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Biblical perspective is informed not so much by Genesis as by the Book of Job’s ‘darksome doors’. In a highly significant passage, he calls on his readers to bear witness as he denounces the ignorance of his contemporaries, challenging them before turning to the Providentialism that was later to undermine his reputation.

      What conclusions can be drawn from knowledge, or otherwise, of the earth’s age and history at the turn of the nineteenth century? The picture is one of hesitancy and contradiction, with the European scholarly elite split between two opposing visions. This ignorance extended to the earth’s history and morphology. In the opening years of the new century, how did Goethe, Jane Austen and Chateaubriand picture the interior of the earth and the planet’s history? This question is nigh on impossible to answer, because we have no way of measuring what they did not know. What historians must bear in mind is that people were divided between two visions. Before we turn to the mysteries of the polar regions, one of the earth’s most widely debated enigmas in the half-century following 1755, we will look not at the earth’s history, but at what people believed its internal structure to be.

NOTES

      1 1. Alain Corbin, Le Territoire du vide: L’Occident et le désir de rivage (1750–1840). Paris: Aubier, 1988; English translation The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, tr. Jocelyn Phelps. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.

      2 2. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 1961, p. 1472.

      3 3. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, A Universal History from the Beginning of the World to the Empire of Charlemagne, tr. James Elphinston. London: David Steel, 1767, p. 11.

      4 4. Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, tr. N. Rowe. London: D. Browne, 1752, pp. 188–9.

      5 5. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, ‘Des époques de la nature’, in Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 2007, pp. 1193–1342.

      6 6. There is some evidence for this argument as early as Buffon’s 1749 work Théorie de la Terre [Theory of the Earth].

      7 7. Osmo Pekonen and Anouchka Vasak, Maupertuis en Laponie: À la recherche de la figure de la Terre. Paris: Hermann, 2014.

      8 8. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Studies of Nature, tr. Henry Hunter. Philadelphia: Joseph Woodward, 1835, p. 67.

      9 9. Ibid., p. 69. Translation modified.

3 Imagining the Earth’s Internal Structure

      At this point in history, there was no way of observing the earth’s interior directly or drilling for deep core samples. As a result, picturing the insides of the globe meant drawing on preconceived notions or ‘understanding(s) of the world based on mythological and literary discourse’.¹ Contemporary thinkers sought to fill this gap in scientific knowledge with a series of ‘theories of the earth’. Naturally, they all drew on the theories in Plato’s Phaedo, which pictured Tartarus, a vast body of water at the centre of the earth, filled by an internal network of rivers of water, fire and mud. This chapter will focus on the most relevant period for this question, beginning in 1650, when theories of the earth began to be published in large numbers, all refuting the Aristotelian belief in an eternal world.

Galileo had begun asking questions about the deep core of the earth, which he imagined to be dense and solid. Theories then began to proliferate between 1650 and 1750, some of them mutually contradictory. Vincent Deparis and Hilaire Legros analyse the writings of Nicolaus Steno, Hooke, Newton, Burnet, Woodward, Whiston and Leibniz, among many others. Though there is much to be said on these early theorists, their writings are beyond the scope of this chapter, other than to point out that much was being written on the question and to outline the theories that seem to have been taken up the most widely.

      The late seventeenth century saw the triumph of Flood geology in the debate on the nature of the earth’s internal structure. Thomas Burnet’s 1681 work Telluris theorica sacra [Sacred Theory of the Earth] argued that the Flood had brought about fundamental changes to the globe, reshaping its featureless surface to create reliefs. Burnet explained this massive impact by reference to the ‘great deep’ of the Bible – a vast internal body of water whipped into a towering storm.

      John Woodward’s theory, published in 1695, doubtless convinced a wider audience. He drew on the existence of fossils to hypothesize that the Flood had completely dissolved all the matter that made up the earth, then laid down sediment ‘in concentric layers in order of gravity’.² Woodward adumbrated, or perhaps paved the way for, the Neptunist theories of the late eighteenth century (see below, chapter 5). The following year, Whiston put forward the hypothesis that a comet might have skimmed the earth, triggering the Flood by adding a considerable quantity