Benoît de Maillet (Saint-Mihiel

Saint-Mihiel

Saint-Mihiel is a commune in the Meuse department in Lorraine in north-eastern France.-History:Saint-Mihiel was captured by the Germans in the first year of World War I, and was re-captured during the Battle of Saint-Mihiel from 12 September to 19 September 1918, during World War...

, 12 April 1656 – Marseille

Marseille

Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

, 30 January 1738) was a well-travelled French diplomat

Diplomat

A diplomat is a person appointed by a state to conduct diplomacy with another state or international organization. The main functions of diplomats revolve around the representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state, as well as the promotion of information and...

 and natural historian. He was French consul general at Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

, and overseer in the Levant

Levant

The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

. He formulated an evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

ary hypothesis

Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...

 to explain the origin of the earth and its contents.

Maillet's geological observations convinced him that the earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 could not have been created in an instant because the features of the crust

Crust (geology)

In geology, the crust is the outermost solid shell of a rocky planet or natural satellite, which is chemically distinct from the underlying mantle...

 indicate a slow development by natural processes. He also believed that creatures on the land were ultimately derived from creatures living in the seas. He believed in the natural origin of man. He estimated that the development of the earth took two billion years.

Life

Maillet was a nobleman of Lorraine

Lorraine (province)

The Duchy of Upper Lorraine was an historical duchy roughly corresponding with the present-day northeastern Lorraine region of France, including parts of modern Luxembourg and Germany. The main cities were Metz, Verdun, and the historic capital Nancy....

, born into a distinguished Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 family. He did not attend university, but he received an excellent classical education. Maillet was interested in geology and natural history, and took advantage of his travels to make observations. He was French general consul at Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

 (1692–1708), during which time he studied the Egyptian pyramids

Egyptian pyramids

The Egyptian pyramids are ancient pyramid-shaped masonry structures located in Egypt.There are 138 pyramids discovered in Egypt as of 2008. Most were built as tombs for the country's Pharaohs and their consorts during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods.The earliest known Egyptian pyramids are found...

, and at Leghorn

Livorno

Livorno , traditionally Leghorn , is a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Livorno, having a population of approximately 160,000 residents in 2009.- History :...

 (1712–1717). He was French overseer in the Levant

Levant

The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

 and the Barbarous states from 1715 until his retirement.

Publication of Telliamed

His main work, Telliamed (his name in reverse), was based on manuscripts written between 1722 and 1732 and was published after his death in 1748. The printed text was the result of ten years' editing by the Abbott Jean Baptiste de Mascrier in an attempt to reconcile the proposed system with the dogma

Dogma

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...

 of the Catholic Church. Maillet relied on him even though he had done a poor job editing Maillet's earlier book Description de l'Egypte (1735). As a result of Mascrier's tinkering, none of the printed editions accurately represents Maillet's work, though the best is the third and final edition, published in the Hague and Paris in 1755, which includes the only known biography of Maillet.

As a result of the assiduous textual work by Neubert, who compared in detail the text of the third edition with the content of copied manuscripts, it is possible to say that the 1755 edition differed from the manuscripts by:

1. Additions and modifications of content originating from Benoit by Mascrier.

2. Additions and modifications of content introduced by Mascrier, which often contradict Benoit's ideas.

3. Modifications in the general arrangement, reorganisation of parts and changes to footnotes by Mascrier to achieve a closer fit with Fontanelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes.

4. Other modifications, generally of a trivial nature, which are of unknown origin.

With this information as a starting point, it has been possible to largely reconstruct Maillet's original content. The translation presented in the 1968 edition is not a simple reprint. It is based on the best surviving manuscript, ILL¹ (Introduction, p. 31). Extensive notes carry explanations, comments, and variations between sources. This edition therefore becomes the basis for any analysis of Maillet's ideas.

The 'Indian philosopher' speaks the views of Maillet himself. The device is transparently obvious, but understandable because the philosopher contradicts the literal word of the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 at a time when this still carried some risk to his person and livelihood. The delay in publication can also be interpreted the same way, protecting the author and then protecting the editor, giving the latter time to soften the blow by watering down Maillet's ideas.

The argument

It was, in its essence, an ultraneptunian

Neptunism

Neptunism is a discredited and obsolete scientific theory of geology proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner in the late 18th century that proposed rocks formed from the crystallisation of minerals in the early Earth's oceans....

 theory of the Earth, and was to a large extent based on field geology discerned during trips throughout Egypt and other Mediterranean countries. It is based essentially on processes today known as sedimentation

Sedimentary rock

Sedimentary rock are types of rock that are formed by the deposition of material at the Earth's surface and within bodies of water. Sedimentation is the collective name for processes that cause mineral and/or organic particles to settle and accumulate or minerals to precipitate from a solution....

, excluding all other geological or geomorphological agents except some minor aspects of weathering

Weathering

Weathering is the breaking down of rocks, soils and minerals as well as artificial materials through contact with the Earth's atmosphere, biota and waters...

. The work therefore seems modern as it touches sedimentation, but fantastical when touching other fields. Maillet observed, but did not always understand, all the major types of rocks forming the Earth's crust.

From the observation of fossilized shells embedded in sedimentary rocks on mountains high above sea level, de Maillet recognized the true nature of fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

s. Not appreciating that the land might rise, he concluded that the earth had originally been entirely covered by water (a theory of René Descartes

René Descartes

René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...

), which had since been steadily lost into the vortex. Maillet derived a rate of fall of sea level, of about three inches per century, from sites where former ports were now above sea level. Working back to the highest mountains, he reached a figure of 2.4 billion years for the age of the earth

Age of the Earth

The age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years This age is based on evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples...

, so he though it quite reasonable to accept that at least 2 billion years had passed since the earth was covered with water. Of course, this attempt is flawed in several ways; but it contains the seed of real progress. He saw the importance of slow natural processes operating over long periods of time, forming and shaping the earth. He introduced the idea that the Earth might be billions of years old, which even a century and a half after his death would have been denied.

Maillet's idea on biology had a similar basis. He thought that life had begun in the water, after the emergence of the highest mountains, but before the continents. He believes that life arose in the shallows surrounding the first land. Sea life, fish, shellfish, algae, diversified and their remains were covered with sediment and became secondary rocks laid down on the sides of primitive mountains. When continents emerged from the water, so did marine organisms. From seaweed

Seaweed

Seaweed is a loose, colloquial term encompassing macroscopic, multicellular, benthic marine algae. The term includes some members of the red, brown and green algae...

 developed trees and shrubs, from flying fish came birds. Man's career began as a fish.

The context for this proto-evolutionary thought is Maillet's belief that space contained the seeds of life, invisible spores always available for seeding. This theory of the origin of life is called panspermia. The really important observation he made was that the lower layers of sedimentary rocks contained animals and plants different from those of today, and some types that were unrecognisable. He appreciated that this was a critical issue and offered several explanations; none of which reach the present idea of evolution.

Maillet's ideas on the history of mankind are the weakest part of his conception. He incorporates a number of myths and traditions which are simply incorrect. His system of calculating time does not work because no remains of humans are present in the kind of sedimentary rocks he examined. He believes man has a long history, that he originated in the water, and developed into a land animal. He knows it is a problem that men do not look as though they were sea creatures, but his explanations of such difficulties are feeble. What he had done was to "combine a correct understanding of artefacts of the iron

Iron Age

The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...

 and bronze age

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

s with the erroneous interpretation of Cainozoic vertebrates as human skeletons, and silicified logs in fluvio-continental deposits as petrified ships (as Steno

Nicolas Steno

Nicolas Steno |Latinized]] to Nicolaus Steno -gen. Nicolai Stenonis-, Italian Niccolo' Stenone) was a Danish pioneer in both anatomy and geology. Already in 1659 he decided not to accept anything simply written in a book, instead resolving to do research himself. He is considered the father of...

did).."