However bold he may have been imaginatively, Benoît de Maillet in person was altogether discreet. Rather than identify himself as the author of these intellectual flights, he contrived the anagram Telliamed, and further protected himself by attributing his theory to an Indian philosopher who had revealed it to a French missionary. “I confess to you,” says the missionary to the philosopher, prudently separating himself from the Indian’s outrageous ideas, “that notwithstanding the small Foundation I find in your system, I am charmed to hear you speak. . . .”
Maillet also stipulated that the manuscript should not be published until eleven years after his death, as though there were a statute of limitations on the digging up of heretics in order to burn or otherwise abuse their corpses.
Despite these precautions, copies ofTelliamed ou Entretien d’un Philosophe Indien avec un Missionnaire Français were circulating through Paris salons during his lifetime; and the great naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, seems to have been much impressed by the startling essay.
Buffon, we should note, admitted to being one of history’s five supreme figures—the others being Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, and Montesquieu. The earth, said he, had been thrown from the sun and congealed until it attained a temperature suitable for life. That beingso, the earth’s exact age could be deduced without resorting to biblical texts. One needed only to heat some iron spheres, observe how long they required to cool, and correlate this information, taking into account the earth’s dimensions. Buffon then announced that he had found our planet to be 74,832 years old. It had sustained life for the past 40,062 years, but because the temperature would continue falling it would become uninhabitable after another 93,291 years, a globe forever sheathed in ice.
Along with these facts, which have not weathered very well, he came close to anticipating Darwin: “It may be assumed that all animals arise from a single form of life which in the course of time produced the rest by processes of perfection and degeneration.” And he went on to say that the organic structure of each natural thing illustrates the following truth: life on earth developed gradually.
However, discretion may at times be advisable, and Buffon could appreciate the monumental power of the Church. No, he wrote somewhat hastily at one point, “no, it is certain—certain by revelation—that all animals have shared equally the grace of creation, each has emerged from the hands of the Creator as it appears to us today.”
One of Buffon’s pupils, Jean-Baptiste Pierre de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, encouraged the attack on biblical dogma. He wrote that species cannot be absolutely distinguished from each other; species pass into one another, proceeding from simple infusoria to the magnificent complexity of Man.
Immanuel Kant had similar thoughts: “It is possible for a chimpanzee or an orangutan, by perfecting its organs, to change at some future date into a human being. Radical alterations in natural conditions may force the ape to walk upright, accustom its hands to the use of tools, and learn to talk.”
Schopenhauer wrote in 1851: “We must imagine the first human beings as having been born in Asia of orangutans and in Africa of chimpanzees. . . .”
James Hutton, a Scottish geologist and farmer, a gentleman of numerous parts—philosopher, chemist, jurist, Quaker, inventor, physicist—Hutton found the world not in a grain of sand but in a brook gently transporting sediment to the sea. Only one portrait of thisextraordinary man survives, revealing a long, sad face. The face of somebody who has looked so far, comments Loren Eiseley, that mortals do not interest him. For the lesson of the industrious brook was this: mountains, plains, rivers, and oceans must be the result of slow topographical changes. The earth’s surface must have been lifted and then eroded, which would take a while. Indeed, Hutton wrote, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Apparently he did not think this contradicted the Bible because he is said to have been gravely shocked when charged by the Royal Irish Academy with atheism; so shocked that he became physically ill and never quite recovered.
Then along came Sir Charles Lyell who demonstrated in three stout volumes,Principles of Geology, how the earth had been modified in the past and how this process continues. If, let us say, you watch some pebbles tumble from a crag, you are watching a mountain disintegrate. Furthermore, he said, any catastrophic flooding in the past had resulted not from a stupendous rain but from glaciers melting.
This latter argument especially troubled the faithful because the Bible was explicit: forty days, forty nights. Rain rain rain rain. Fifteen cubits of water. We had God’s Word. Besides, look at the evidence.
In 1726, for example, the city doctor of Zurich, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, had unearthed a fossilized skeleton near the village of Oeningen. This ancient sinner, according to Scheuchzer’s calculations, went down for the last time in 2306 B.C.
“You will like to know, my learned friend,” wrote Scheuchzer to the prominent British physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, “that we have obtained some relics of the race of man drowned in the Flood. . . . What we have here is no vision of the mere imagination, but the well-preserved bones, and much in number, of a human skull, quite clearly distinguishable. .
