Introduction

Cosmography, in the context of this portrayal of a historically neglected area of eighteenth-century science, is another name for the ‘Idée Générate de la Géographie’ drawn up in 1752 by Philippe Buache, son-in-law of the famous French cartographer Guillaume De L'Isle and his successor as first geographer to Louis XV. This scheme was then presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the form of three charts containing detailed classifications of historical, physical, and mathematical geography respectively; these were duly approved nine years later, and published in 1762. Significantly, the third chart ‘Géographie Mathématique ou Astronomique’ is identical, down to the last detail, with another entitled ‘Mathematische Astronomie’ in Johann Gabriel Doppelmaier's Atlas coelestis (Nuremberg, 1752). The two titles reflect what may at first appear to be ambiguity in the conceptions of geography and astronomy, but arise from the fact that ‘astronomy’ was then regarded as possessing a terrestrial as well as a celestial component. The eighteenth-century meaning may, however, be captured by substituting the word ‘cosmography’ to encompass both components of that broader definition. The major sub-divisions of this classificatory system may therefore be represented as shown in Fig. 1.

According to Doppelmaier, Buache, and the Paris academicians, the category ‘earth’ includes: the knowledge of the shape of our planet; its climate in the torrid, temperate, and polar regions; the specification of great circles such as the equator, horizon, and meridian, and small circles such as the tropics, arctic circles, and latitude circles generally.

It is somewhat difficult to describe and understand an intellectual revolution correctly when one has lived it day after day. Only by recalling how things were in the early 1950s may we take the measure of the change that has occurred in the last twenty-five years and has affected almost every field of research, including history in general and the history of science in particular.

We do not have to undertake such a general description here, and fortunately so: we must limit ourselves to the precise problems of the history of eighteenth-century life science. But because we are historians, we know how difficult it is to isolate a problem from its context and, as historians of science, we know that changes in our discipline are closely linked to the opinions prevailing in the philosophy of science and history. It will therefore be necessary to refer, even if briefly, to a more general situation if we want to understand what has happened in our field of inquiry. Eighteenth-century scientists, particularly naturalists, may be looked at in two different ways. If we read Charles Bonnet's observations of aphis parthenogenesis, Haller's experiments on muscular excitability, or Spallanzani's notes on artificial fertilization, we may be tempted to consider those scientists as the first ‘modern’ experimentalists. But if we think that they accepted the fantastic theory of the ‘pre-existing germs’, we cannot help considering them as ‘archaic’ thinkers.