Terra Incognita. Alain Corbin
However, it is difficult to measure the extent of this scientific elite and to find out whether artists, writers and political leaders asked the same questions.
Working on the hypothesis that they most likely did, they must have been very confused by the clashing theories, incomplete experiments and inaccurate observations made by the scientists of the day! It is, however, fair to say that unlike half a century previously, most of the elite would now have been relatively comfortable with stepping back from the Biblical narrative and understanding that the earth’s morphology reflected a history that was hundreds of millennia old. This was a fundamental stage in overturning earlier representations of the earth.
For early-nineteenth-century thinkers, sedimentary strata and the potential for horizontal and vertical movement, whether driven by water or by fire, and the nature of the fossils entombed in them must have made up a somewhat incoherent data set that would have been difficult to take as the basis for a clear picture of the planet they lived on. It should also be borne in mind that what we now know of glacial reliefs and multiple successive periods of glaciation was at that point wholly unknown, and that mountaineering and mountain exploration were in their infancy. Doubtless the most cultivated travellers – a group we will return to later – were tempted to daydream and celebrate the God of natural theology, gleaning emotional sustenance from the thinkers who codified the Sublime or from the poets and writers of Antiquity. The conflicting, vague, incomplete theories of contemporary science were perhaps less immediately appealing.
Yet there were many other fields in which the map was almost completely blank. We now turn to what was known – and hence what was not known – about the polar regions, their seas and the eternal ice that kept them inviolate.
NOTES
1 1. Vincent Deparis and Hilaire Legros, Voyage à l’intérieur de la Terre: De la géographie antique à la géophysique moderne: Une histoire des idées. Paris: CNRS, 2002, p. 18. The following pages owe much to this remarkable book.
2 2. Ibid., p. 142.
3 3. Ibid., p. 113ff.
4 4. Quoted in ibid., pp. 198–9.
5 5. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History, Containing A Theory of the Earth, tr. James Smith Barr. London: Printed for the proprietor, 1797, p. 7.
6 6. Deparis and Legros, Voyage à l’intérieur de la Terre, pp. 232–3.
7 7. Ibid., p. 233.
8 8. Ibid.
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