Thus, we may note the irony of worldliness in the context of scales of time: one trades immediate recognition in life for the curious status of continuing, but anonymous, influence. How would French biology have developed without the Muséum, and without the forty-four volumes of Histoire naturelle? Can a great discovery by a recluse match the ultimately silent achievements of such worldliness? T. H. Huxley, with his tireless round of speeches, exhortations, popular books, politicking, and service on government committees, may have left a greater impact than Darwin upon British society. But Darwin, who, in the last decades of his life, almost never left his country house, even for trips to nearby London, persists (properly, I would claim, in another argument for another time) as the icon of our discoveries and our fears—while Huxley has become a faded memory.
How, similarly, can we measure Buffon’s continuing presence? In the recent and brilliant reconstruction of the Grande Galérie of his Muséum into the world’s finest modern exhibit on evolution? In Histoire naturelle, a treatise that has never been entirely out of print, and that taught students throughout the world as a primary text for more than a century—often in pirated editions that didn’t acknowledge Buffon? (For example, few people know, I suspect, that the poet Oliver Goldsmith, to earn his bread, wrote a multivolumed History of the Earth and Animated Nature that amounts to little more than lighdy annotated Buffon. My own collection of popular science books includes a volume, published in New York during the late nineteenth century, entitled Buffon’s Natural History—a one-volume amalgam of bits and pieces from Natural History, and undoubtedly paying not a penny in royalties to Buffon’s estate.)
Yet, and finally, the positive reasons for the paradoxical correlation of later anonymity with continuing impact also include a factor that should be judged as paramount, and that also distills the core of Buffon’s greatest contribution to the history of ideas. Some of the grandest tools in the arsenal of our consciousness work so broadly and so generally that we can scarcely assign authorship to a single person. (Darwin can be identified as the discoverer of natural selection, even as the first comprehensive defender of biological evolution based on hard data drawn from all major subjects of natural history. But no one can be called the inventor of a developmental, rather than a static, view of nature.)
Buffon became the central figure in one of the great transformations of human thought—the discovery of history as a guiding principle for organizing the data of the natural world, including many aspects of human diversity (from language, to the arts, to social systems). As the earth’s great age—its “deep time”—became apparent, and as revolutionary ideologies replaced monarchies in parts of Europe and America, such a reconstruction of knowledge hovered “in the air,” and would have occurred if Buffon had never been born (see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, University of Chicago Press, 1984). But, through a combination of the best subject matter to express such a change, an incomparable prose style, and a wide and dedicated readership, Buffon became the most influential focus of this transformation, with Histoire naturelle as the primary agent.
BUFFON’S DISCOVERY AND DEFINITION OF HISTORY
A truly historical account of nature demands deep time. But time can only provide a matrix for the unfolding of events. History requires the ordering of phenomena in narrative form—that is, as a temporal series with direction given by a sequence of complex and unrepeatable events, linked one to the next by sensible reasons for transition. In short, to qualify as history, such a sequence must embody the last two syllables of its name: it must tell a story.
Most pre-Buffonian science included no history. Organisms had been created in primal perfection on a young earth, and none had become extinct (except in the singularity of Noah’s flood—and unique transforming events don’t constitute a history). The rocks of the earth represented either an original creation or the residues of Noah’s flood. Even the influential cosmologies of Newton, and of Buffon’s younger and brilliant colleague Laplace, purposely rejected history in positing exactly repeating cycles (perhaps with self-adjusting variations) of “eternal return”—as Darwin recognized so well when he ended his Origin of Species (1859) by contrasting the rich historicity of evolution with the sterility of endless cosmological turning: “Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
In the most important change of his own views between the inception of Natural History in 1749 and the publication of its most important volume in 1778, Buffon became an advocate for historical thinking. His first volume of 1749, as discussed earlier, had been sufficiently radical in positing a long and indeterminate age for the earth. Buffon did propose one historical item in this initial Theory of the Earth—the first important hypothesis for the origin of planets by cometary impact into the sun, with ejection of masses to form the planetary spheres. But following this tempestuous origin, the earth of Buffon’s first volume experienced no further history—for geology had recorded only a series of repeating cycles in erosion and exposure of continents.
But Buffon, confuting the cliché that scientists must develop their best ideas in their youth or not at all, reversed his original belief, devised an intrinsically and thoroughly historical theory of the earth, and published his results at the age of seventy-one, in a volume that became by far his most popular, his most influential, and his most controversial: Des époques de la nature (The epochs of nature), which originally appeared in 1778 as supplementary volume five of Histoire naturelle. This treatise became the most important scientific document ever written in promoting the transition to a fully historical view of nature. (Since Buffon’s influence lay largely in his command of language, The Epochs of Nature also illustrates the underappreciated principle that literary style may not be irrelevant to the success of scientific ideas.) And yet, as argued above, this shift to historical thinking raised too big an issue, involving too many subjects and approaches, to lay in one man’s lap—so Buffon’s name never became firmly attached to his most important intellectual achievement.
The Epochs of Nature rose from complex roots in Buffon’s psyche and activities. He did not simply devise this major transition from his armchair. Ever since developing his theory of planetary formation by cometary impact upon the sun, Buffon had searched for evidence that might indicate the time of origin, and the consequent age of the earth. (“Indeterminably long” could not satisfy a man of his restless energy.) After setting up his forges for smelting iron, a testable idea struck Buffon. If the earth had originated as a fireball, he could presumably calculate the length of time required for sufficient cooling to form a solid surface that could serve as a substrate for geological strata and life itself.
Buffon therefore began to experiment with the cooling of iron balls made in his forge. He then scaled his results upward to theoretical calculations for iron balls the size of the earth, and then to more realistic models for balls of various compositions more closely mimicking the earth’s structure. Buffon pursued these experiments and calculations for years, obviously enjoying this return to his mathematical roots. He filled chapters of Histoire naturelle with his results, and finally decided that the earth must be at least 75,000 years old (and probably a good deal more ancient).
These experiments may have validated deep time in a quantitative manner, but they inspired an even more important change in Buffon’s thinking, for they gave him the key to history. A continually cooling earth provided an arrow for time, a fundamental direction for the physical surface and for life as well. Since all organisms originate in perfect adaptation to surrounding environments— and since these environments have changed directionally through time to colder and colder conditions—the composition of faunas must also vary, as some species become extinct when climates alter beyond their power to cope, and new species, adapted to the changed circumstances, then appear.
(As one example of the radi
cal nature of Buffon’s historical view, the idea of extinction stuck in the craw of traditional naturalists, who remained committed to an earth made perfect in all ways at the outset, and who therefore could not abide the idea that species might disappear through failure of adaptation. Thomas Jefferson, Buffon’s rival, could cite many good reasons for sending Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition, but one small factor lay in his hope that these explorers might find living mammoths in uncharted western lands, thus shaking Buffon’s claim that species could die.)
Buffon constructed a rich history of seven successive epochs, all controlled by the continuous cooling of the earth from an original status as a solar fireball: first, the origin of the earth and planets by cometary impact; second, the formation of the solid earth and its mineral deposits; third, the covering of continents by oceans and the origin of marine life; fourth, the retreat of waters and the emergence of new continents; fifth, the appearance of animal life on land; sixth, the fragmentation of continents and the formation of current topography; seventh, the origin of humans and our accession to power.
Note that Buffon did not follow the most traditional arrow of history by arguing that life became continually more complex. In fact, he viewed the first marine creatures of epoch three (including ammonites and fishes) as already fully intricate. Buffon was not, after all, an evolutionist, and he built his arrow of time as a vector of decreasing warmth, not as a rising parade of organic progress. This arrow led him to a pessimistic conclusion, well constructed to fuel cosmic angst: the earth must eventually freeze over, leading to the extirpation of all life. This concept of a “heat death” for the earth became one of the most contentious and interesting ideas in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century thought, a theme of many poems, plays, and paintings.
Buffon’s history also included a set of intriguing consequences, some internal to the theory, others inspired by the reactions of readers. To mention just two, Buffon might be cited by current ecoactivists (and I do say this facetiously) as an antihero—for he developed the notion of a greenhouse effect caused by human burning of forests, but welcomed such an imprint of advancing civilization as a device for postponing the earth’s death by cold. Buffon wrote: “Cleansing, clearing, and populating a country gives it heat for several thousand years…. Paris and Quebec are at about the same latitude; Paris would therefore be as cold as Quebec if France and all the regions surrounding it were as lacking in men, and covered with woods … as are the neighboring lands of Canada.”
Second, Buffon became the surprised recipient of several sumptuous gifts from Catherine II of Russia (a.k.a. Catherine the Great)—a collection of furs, all the medals of her reign (in gold), and her portrait on a gold snuffbox encrusted with diamonds. Catherine had been delighted by Buffon’s argument that since the earth becomes increasingly colder through time, new species originate in high latitudes and then migrate toward the tropics as temperatures continue to drop. Russia therefore became a cradle of life, rather than the frigid refugium envisioned by most previous writers. Buffon, ingratiating as always, thanked Catherine in a glowing letter that wished her well in campaigns against the Ottoman Empire (“that stagnating part of Europe”), and stated his hope to see “beautiful nature and the arts descend a second time from the North to the South under the standard of [her majesty’s] powerful genius.”
Moreover, and finally, the eminently orderly Buffon knew exactly what he had accomplished. He consciously promoted history as a novel and coordinating theme for all nature. He not only proposed a theory of origin, an arrow of time, and a narrative in seven epochs. He also knew that the triumph of history would require a fundamentally new way of thinking, and an explicit methodology, not yet familiar to scientists, for reconstructing the immensely long and poorly preserved record of the earth and life. He therefore suggested that natural scientists take their cue from procedures already worked out by students of human history. The Epochs of Nature begins with this call for an entirely new mode of thinking:
In civil history, we consult tides, we research medals, we decipher ancient inscriptions in order to determine the time of human revolutions and to fix the dates of events in the moral order. Similarly, in natural history, it is necessary to excavate the archives of the world, to draw old monuments from the entrails of the earth, to collect their debris, and to reassemble into a single body of proof all the indices of physical changes which enable us to go back to the different ages of nature. This is the only way to fix points in the immensity of space, and to place a certain number of milestones on the eternal route of time. (My translation.)
No other person could possibly have provided better fuel for such a transformation in the history of human thought: this man of such restless energy; this man who operated forges and who developed the experimental and mathematical skill to infer the age of the earth from balls of iron; who composed thirty-six volumes of the greatest treatise ever written in natural history by working fourteen hours a day for more than forty years. And if all these skills and attributes could not turn the tide, Buffon also wrote in an elegant prose that placed him, a “mere” student of nature, among the leading men of letters in his interesting time. Buffon surely knew how to prevail—for style, after all, is the man himself.
2 I wrote this essay in the summer of 1998, in medio Monicae anni, just before a presidential impeachment.
5
The Proof of
Lavoisier’s Plates
I. WRITING IN THE MARGINS
I ONCE HAD A TEACHER WITH AN IDIOSYNCRATIC HABIT that distressed me forty years ago, but now—and finally, oh sweet revenge!—can work for me to symbolize the general process of human creativity. I never knew a stingier woman, and though she taught history in a junior high school in New York City, she might well have been the frugal New England farmer with a box marked “pieces of string not worth saving.” Readers who attended New York public schools in the early 1950s will remember those small yellow slips of paper, three by six inches at most, that served all purposes from spot quizzes to “canvasses” for art class. Well, Mrs. Z. would give us one sheet—only one—for any classroom exam, no matter how elaborate the required answers. She would always reply to any plea for advice about containment or, God forbid, for an additional yellow sheet (comparable in her system of values to Oliver Twist’s request for more soup) with a firm refusal followed by a cheery instruction expressed in her oddly lilting voice: “… and if you run out of room, just write in the margins!”
Margins play an interesting role in the history of scholarship, primarily for their schizophrenic housing of the two most contradictory forms of intellectual activity. Secondary commentaries upon printed texts (often followed by several layers of commentaries upon the commentaries) received their official designation as “marginalia” to note their necessary position at the edges. The usual status of such discourse as derivative and trivial, stating more and more about less and less at each iteration, leads to the dictionary definition of marginalia as “nonessential items” (Webster’s Third New International) and inevitably recalls the famous, and literally biting, satire of Jonathan Swift:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em;
And so proceed ad infinitum
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.
But margins also serve the diametrically opposite purpose of receiving the first fruits and inklings of novel insights and radical revisions. When received wisdom has hogged all the central locations, where else can creative change begin? The curmudgeon and cynic in me regards Thoreau’s Walden as the most overquoted (and underwhelming) American classic, but I happily succumb for the first time to cite his one-liner for a vibrant existence: “I love a broad margin to my life.”
Literal margins, however, must usually be narrow—and some of the greatest insights in the history of human thought necessarily be
gan in such ferociously cramped quarters. The famous story of Fermat’s Last Theorem, no matter how familiar, cannot be resisted in this context: when the great mathematician died in 1665, his executors found the following comment in his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica, next to a discussion of the claim that no natural numbers x, y, and z exist such that xn + yn = zn, where n is a natural number greater than 2: “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it.” Mathematicians finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem just a few years ago, to great subsequent fanfare and an outpouring of popular books. But we shall never know if Fermat truly beat the best of the latest by three hundred years, or if (as my own betting money says, admittedly with no good evidence) he had a promising idea and never detected the disabling flaw in the midst of his excitement.
I devote this essay to the happier and opposite story of a great insight that a cramped margin did manage (just barely) to contain and nurture. This tale, for reasons that I do not fully understand, remains virtually unknown (and marginal in this frustrating sense) both to scientists and historians alike—although the protagonist ranks as one of the half dozen greatest scientists in Western history, and the subject stood at the forefront of innovation in his time. In any case, the movement of this insight from marginality in 1760 to centrality by 1810. marks the birth of modern geology, and gives us a rare and precious opportunity to eavesdrop on a preeminent thinker operating in the most exciting and instructive of all times: at a labile beginning in the codification of a major piece of natural knowledge—a unique moment featuring a landscape crossed by one hundred roads, each running in the right general direction toward a genuine truth. Each road, however, reaches a slightly different Rome, and our eventual reading of nature depends crucially upon the initial accidents and contingencies specifying the path actually taken.
The Lying Stones of Marrakech Page 11