2. their thirty-year-old Genevan tutor, Abraham Trembley: Abraham Trembley, Instructions d’un père à ses enfants, sur la nature et sur la religion, 2 vols (Geneva: Chapuis, 1775), 1:xii. On the Bentinck family, see Paul-Emile Schazmann, The Bentincks: The History of a European Family (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), and Aubrey Le Bond, Charlotte Sophie, Countess Bentinck: Her Life and Times (London: Hutchinson, 1912). William Bentinck’s correspondence with his sons’ tutors and others is in the British Museum: Bentinck Papers. Countess Bentinck later became an intimate friend of Voltaire’s and is considered the inspiration for his Candide. Trembley gave his own detailed account of his discovery of the polyp in his 1744 work, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce.
3. “I was surprised,” he recalled later: John R. Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva: Scientist and Philosopher, 1710–1784 (London: Edward Arnold, 1952), 28–29; see also Baker’s chapter on Trembley’s educational theories, 188–204.
4. All three men were obsessed with insects: On seventeenth-century entomology, see Janina Wellmann, “Picture Metamorphosis: The Transformation of Insects from the End of the Seventeenth to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” NTM 16, no. 2 (2008): 183–211.
5. he compared his aphid to the virgin Danae: Bonnet to Réaumur, July 13, 1740, Papers of Réaumur and Bonnet, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris. The king of Argos imprisoned his daughter Danae in a tower because the Delphic oracle foretold that his death would be at the hands of his daughter’s son. But the tower was no protection from the gods. Zeus seduced her disguised as a shower of gold, and she bore Perseus.
6. a form of asexual reproduction that requires no fertilization: For a detailed analysis of the discovery of parthenogenesis, see Marc Ratcliff’s fine chapter “Insects, Hermaphrodites and Ambiguity” in Quest for the Invisible, 57–73.
7. “These are assuredly observations of great importance”: Réaumur to Bonnet, August 5, 1740; cited in Virginia P. Dawson, Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Réaumur (Philadelphia: Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 1988), 80, 114.
8. “A fact such as the one which aphids presented”: Trembley, Mémoires, 18.
9. “Almost the whole of the month of September 1740 passed”: Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva, 29.
10. “It was on the 25th November 1740 that I cut the first polyp”: Ibid., 32.
11. “Throughout the day I continually observed the points”: Ibid.
12. “I saw these parts walk, take steps”: Maurice Trembley, Correspondance inédite, 28, translated by Virginia P. Dawson in her Nature’s Enigma, 101–2.
13. “perhaps one of the most ardent that there is in Nature”: Bonnet to Trembley, December 18, 1740, George Trembley Archives, Toronto, Ontario. See Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 89.
14. “Who knows if one mating might not serve for several generations?”: Trembley to Bonnet, January 27, 1741, Ms Bonnet 24, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 89.
15. to tell Bonnet about his “little aquatic being”: Ibid., 138.
16. his “little aquatic Being ought to be regarded”: Bonnet to Trembley, March 24, 1741, George Trembley Archives, Toronto, Ontario; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 138.
17. the philosophical questions the experiment raised: On the polyp as a source for materialist and vitalist ideas, see Aram Vartanian, “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 259–80; Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle: La génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), 749; Ratcliff, Quest for the Invisible, 103–25; Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 155–56; Giulio Barsanti, “Les Phénomènes ‘étranges’ et ‘paradoxaux’ aux origines de la première révolution biologique (1740–1810),” in Guido Cimino and François Duchesneau, eds., Vitalisms from Haller to the Cell Theory (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 67–82; Barbara Maria Stafford, “Images of Ambiguity, Eighteenth-Century Microscopy, and the Neither/Nor,” in D. P. Miller and P. H. Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 230–57; Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 203; and Brian J. Ford, Single Lens: The Story of the Simple Microscope (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 109–11.
18. Bonnet … began a new series of aphid experiments: Bonnet to Trembley, March 24, 1741, George Trembley Archives, Toronto, Ontario.
19. “If this excellent friend had been able to foresee all the evil”: Cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 91.
20. “never did an insect cause so much uproar”: Réaumur to Trembley, August 30, 1741, in Maurice Trembley and Emile Guyénot, eds., Correspondance inédite entre Réaumur et Abraham Trembley (Geneva: Georg, 1943), 106.
21. “The story of the Phoenix who is born from the ashes”: Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1741), 1:46.
22. “A miserable insect has just shown itself to the world”: [Gilles Auguste Bazin], Lettres d’Eugène à Clarice (Strasbourg: Imprimerie du Roi et de Monseigneur le Cardinal de Rohan, 1745); cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 186.
23. Was Descartes then right after all: Descartes’ ideas had been popularized by Bernard de Fontenelle’s bestselling Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds; they dominated early-eighteenth-century thought.
24. opportunities to refute this … godless way of seeing the world: Although Descartes’ ideas had permeated natural philosophy so far by the eighteenth century that it was second nature for Bonnet, Lyonet, and Trembley to refer to all small organisms as “little machines” and to their workings as “mechanisms,” they believed that these mechanisms were operated by God. See Virginia Dawson’s chapter “The Ragged Cartesian Fabric of Eighteenth-Century Biology” in Nature’s Enigma, 25–51.
25. “All that I ardently wish”: Bonnet to Cramer, June 29, 1741, Ms Suppl. 384, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 141.
26. “to deal a heavy blow to the System”: Cramer to Bonnet, June 1741, Ms Bonnet 43, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 141.
27. “Let me breathe a little”: Cramer to Bonnet, December 1741; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 169.
28. he began to experiment on aquatic worms: Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 143–44.
29. “For what end?” he asked: Bonnet to Réaumur, November 4, 1741, Papers of Réaumur and Bonnet, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 141.
30. He proposed a bland explanation: Réaumur to Bonnet, November 30, 1741, Ms Bonnet 26, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris.
31. “I am entirely taken up with dispatching polyps”: Trembley to Martin Folkes, July 16, 1743, Ms Folkes, vol. 4, letter 66; cited in Ratcliff, Quest for the Invisible, 12.
32. It was a brilliant strategy: Ratcliff, Quest for the Invisible, 12.
33. “Apart from electricity, naturalists did not deal”: Ibid., 13.
34. She gave him a long report by letter: Madame Geoffrin to Martin Folkes, January 12, 1743; cited in Harcourt Brown, “Madame Geoffrin and Martin Folkes: Six New Letters,” Modern Language Quarterly 1 (1940): 219.
35. “We are no less sensible of your great candour”: Folkes to Trembley, November 30, 1743, Ms Trembley, 91–92; cited in Ratcliff, Quest for the Invisible, 21.
36. Baker published a two-hundred-page account: Henry Baker, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype (London: R. Dodsley, 1743), 7–10, 209–10.
37. “The marvelous properties of the new Polyp”: Anonymous, [report of Philosophical Transactions 42:467], Bibliothèque Britannique 22, no. 1 (1743): 159.
38. It had become
a sensation: For the early speculation on the polyps and other insects that reproduced after cutting, see Charles Bonnet, “Of Insects Which Are Multiplied, as It Were, by Cutting or Slips,” Philosophical Transactions 42, no. 470 (1743): 468–88. The discovery was also published in French in Charles Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie ou observations sur les pucerons (Amsterdam: Luzac, 1745). See also William Bentinck, “Abstract of Part of a Letter from the Honourable William Bentinck, Esq., F.R.S., to Martin Folkes, Esq., Pr.R.S., Communicating the Following Paper from Mons. Trembley, of the Hague,” Philosophical Transactions 42, no. 467 (1743): ii (the paper that followed was Abraham Trembley, “Observations and Experiments upon the Freshwater Polypus, by Monsieur Trembley, at the Hague,” iii–xi); Duke of Richmond, “Part of a Letter from His Grace the Duke of Richmond to M. Folkes,” Philosophical Transactions 42, no. 470 (1743): 510–13; Baker, Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype; and Thomas Lord, “Concerning Some Worms Whose Parts Live After They Have Been Cut Asunder,” Philosophical Transactions 42, no. 470 (1743): 522–23.
39. The polyp appeared to be the point of passage: See Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 167–68.
40. God had originally created a multitude of germs: This idea, held by others in the eighteenth century, was called preformism. See Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, eds., The Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 164–69.
41. If there was progress, he argued: Ibid., 168.
42. “Nature is assuredly admirable in the conservation of individuals”: C. Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés, in Oeuvres d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie, 8 vols. (Neuchâtel, 1779–83; first published 1762), 3:90; cited in Bentley Glass, “Heredity and Variation in the Eighteenth Century Concept of Species,” in Glass, Temkin, and Straus, Forerunners of Darwin, 164.
43. Man was immortal: See Charles Otis Whitman, “The Palingenesia and the Germ Doctrine” and “Bonnet’s Theory of Evolution—A System of Negation,” in his Biological Lectures (Woods Hole, Mass.: Marine Biological Laboratory, 1894), 205–72.
44. “Mr. de Buffon claims to explain nearly everything”: Abraham Trembley to William Bentinck, January 9/20, 1750, Ms Egerton 1726, British Library, London; cited in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, 187.
45. Now that so many men and women had seen the polyp regenerate: For a fascinating discussion of what Marc Ratcliff calls the Trembley effect, see his fine essay L’Effet Trembley, ou la naissance de la zoologie marine (Geneva: La Baconnière, 2010).
46. Ponds, seabeds, and rock pools … were terra incognita: Baker, Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype, 207.
47. In the four vignettes commissioned for Trembley’s Memoir: The polyp diagrams in the Memoir were engraved by Pierre Lyonet, the four vignettes by the Dutch draftsman Cornelius Pronk, a protégé of William Bentinck’s.
48. Despite the emptiness portrayed in the picture: Baker, Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype, 37.
49. they may have been leaders of a group of freemasons: Margaret C. Jacob makes these claims in Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Her claims have been disputed by several scholars, including Marc Ratcliff.
50. They had strong links with radical publishing networks: Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 245–47. See also Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 129–30.
51. The freethinkers of The Hague: Paul Hazard, Le Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1714 (Paris: Boivin, 1935), and Margaret C. Jacob, “Hazard Revisited,” in Phyllis Mack, ed., Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 250–72.
52. Trembley’s discovery spawned a new age of natural philosophical speculation: Charles Bonnet continued to struggle with his eyesight for the rest of his life; he seems rarely to have left the country house where he lived outside Geneva with his wife. Though childless, they raised his wife’s adopted nephew, who became the celebrated physicist and Alpine traveler Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. Unable to undertake close microscopal work, Bonnet wrote books of an increasingly philosophical and metaphysical nature that supported his developing theory of preexistent germs. Trembley left the Bentinck household in 1747; he traveled through Europe on the Grand Tour as the tutor and companion of the fifteen-year-old 3rd Duke of Richmond from 1750 to 1755. Later he married and dedicated the rest of his life to raising and educating his children and writing books on educational methods.
6. THE CONSUL OF CAIRO
1. the French consul, Benoît de Maillet: See Harriet Dorothy Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Cairo Letters,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 169 (1977): 134, and Paul Masson, Histoire du commerce français dans le Levant au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1911); Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, was one of a dynasty of French politicians who ran the Conseil de la Marine, all of whom Maillet reported to: Louis was secretary from 1690 until 1699; his son Jérôme succeeded him from 1699 to 1714; Jérôme’s son Jean was secretary of a newly formed Conseil de la Marine from 1723 to 1737. Louis Phélypeaux was a family friend from Lorraine and appointed Maillet to the position in Egypt in 1692. Despite his dislike for Jérôme, Maillet remained loyal to the family of his patrons for more than forty years. I have largely composed this picture of Maillet’s life in Egypt, Leghorn, Paris, and Marseilles from the letters he left behind, now in the Archives Nationales, Correspondance Consulaire, which have been examined in Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Cairo Letters,” 115–85; Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Letters to the Marquis de Caumont,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 60 (1977): 311–38; Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Leghorn Letters,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 30 (1964): 351–76; and Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Marseilles Letters,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 37 (1965): 109–45.
2. Cairo, once a great capital: Of the twenty-five trading posts that flourished in Egypt in 1709, only eight or nine survived by 1724. Letter from Maillet to the Comte de Maurepas, March 19, 1724, in Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Marseilles Letters,” 120.
3. the first sustained attempt to prove that species had mutated: Lester G. Crocker, “Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Transformism,” in Glass, Temkin, and Straus, Forerunners of Darwin, 123–24.
4. “One cannot but admire the beauty of these domes”: Benoît de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte, 1735 ed., 1:200–201.
5. Maillet began his investigations into Egyptian history: See Claudine Cohen, “Benoît de Maillet et la diffusion de l’histoire naturelle à l’aube des lumières,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 44, no. 3–4 (1991): 334.
6. In Histories, Maillet read Herodotus’ excited observations: Almost certainly the 1677 edition published in Paris by G. de Luyne.
7. Benoît de Maillet set out to find Memphis: Maillet, Telliamed, 1750, 100 (I have used the English edition of 1750, which is a very close translation of the original French edition of 1748); see also the annotated translation and detailed study of the various manuscript versions undertaken by Albert V. Carozzi: Carozzi, ed., Telliamed (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1968). A league is around three miles or an hour’s walk; hence at this point Memphis was seventy-five miles from the sea.
8. “this fame Flux and Reflux”: Maillet, Telliamed, 92.
9. he knew he would have to publish anonymously: On the history of anonymity in publishing, see John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 2008).
10. “What if they were clever enough to navigate”: Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, translated by Elizabeth Gunning (London: Hurst, 1803; first published in 1686), 65.
11. “Were the sky only a blue arch”: Ibid., 112.
12. the theory t
hat stars had been born from a vortex: Claude Gadrois, Discours sur les influences des astres selon les principes de M. Descartes (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1671).
13. an approving description of “the simple potter”: For further material on Maillet’s use of Palissy, see Carozzi, Telliamed, 335–36.
14. new species were being produced constantly: Maillet, Telliamed, 276–77.
15. After leaving Egypt in 1708 and settling in Leghorn: See Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Leghorn Letters,” 360–63.
16. Here they found a hollow log: Maillet, Telliamed, 50–51.
17. Khayyám’s ideas about the diminution of the sea: Ibid., 159.
18. In 1717, Maillet returned from Leghorn: Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Marseilles Letters,” 125. 118 Maillet set up house in the rue de Rome: Ibid., 133.
19. it was difficult for him to focus on his book: Ibid., 113.
20. A clandestine book trade had burgeoned in Paris: See Jane McLeod, “Provincial Book Trade Inspectors in Eighteenth-Century France,” in French History 12, no. 2 (1998): 127–48, and Robert Darnton, “A Police Officer Sorts His Files,” in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Vintage, 1985), 145–89.
21. But what was he to do with his most dangerous book?: See Miguel Benítez, “Benoît de Maillet et la littérature clandestine: Étude de sa correspondance avec l’abbé Le Mascrier,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 183 (1980): 143.
22. Conversation 3, “On the Origin of Species”: Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Letters to the Marquis de Caumont,” 315.
23. “Telliamed has all the trouble in the world”: Ibid., 315–16.
24. “The Transformation of a Silk-worm or a Caterpillar”: Maillet, Telliamed, 225.
25. “Your Histories read … that in the Year 592 of your Era”: Ibid., 230–31.
26. records of sea people sightings: Ibid., 232–44.
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