Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Many late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century commentators
remarked on the difficulties of estimating geological time. We have
seen the empirical evidence presented by two Englishmen, but they
were not alone in their efforts. On the Continent, and particularly in
France, others were similarly doubting that the Earth was very young,
but few attempted to quantify just how old. One of these men, a
French diplomat and naturalist, Benoˆt de Maillet (1656-1738), who
was interested in sedimentology and who had with his grandfather
studied sediments and the disposition of fossils in them, wrote a topic
over a long period between 1692 and 1718 which he called Telliamed;
ou, Entretiens d'un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire fran¸ais
sur la diminution de la mer, la formation de la terre, l'origine de
l'homme, &c. He attempted to get it published but failed and was
forced to circulate manuscript copies of the work clandestinely. Seven
of these are still known to exist, but the whereabouts of the original is
unknown. It created quite a storm among the learned men of Europe
and in the hierarchy of the church, and was only finally published
some thirty years later, after the author's death. The manuscript had
been entrusted into the care of the Abb´ le Mascrier who was so
worried about the unorthodox religious content of the topic that he
modified portions of it, but also took the step of publishing it under the
named editorship of a lawyer, Jean Antoine Guer, who in fact had
absolutely nothing to do with it. Monsieur Guer's reaction to his
association with the volume is unfortunately not recorded. By the
third edition the abbot was confident enough to admit that he was
its editor. Three editions appeared in French in 1748, 1749 and 1755,
and two in English in 1750 and 1797. This last was printed in
Baltimore and aptly contains in the title 'A very curious work'.
Maillet was of noble stock and was brought up in the region of
Lorraine. At the age of thirty-five he became a career diplomat, first
serving as Consul General in Egypt, and then from 1708 as Consul in
Livorno on the northwest coast of modern-day Italy. After spending
seven years in this area of beautiful and interesting geology, he became
an inspector of French interests in the east and on the Barbary Coast
