In Retrospect: Leibniz's Protogaea

摘要

The first English translation of Gottfried Leibniz's earth science treatise records the difficulties of understanding our planet before geologists appreciated deep time, Richard Fortey discovers. It is something of a game among historians to try and detect the earliest hints of a major scientific breakthrough in a little-known work discovered through recondite scholarship. Charles Darwin's supposed debt to his grandfather Erasmus is an example, or maybe geologist Charles Lyell's insufficient acknowledgement of the early geological work of Nicolaus Steno. When the savant in question is Gottfried Wil-helm Leibniz (1646-1716) - the man who developed calculus independently of Isaac Newton - hidden insights might genuinely be anticipated. Here was a prolific thinker of range and profundity. His Protogaea, a posthumously published 1749 treatise on earth sciences, has now been translated from its original Latin into English for the first time, and bears a title that chimes with our current concerns about global ecosystems. What did the great man make of the history of Earth?