Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm | First edition of Leibnitz’s posthumously published geological treatise

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm

Protogaea sive de prima facie Telluris et antiquissimae historiae vestigiis in ipsis naturae monumentis dissertatio ex schedis manuscriptis viri illustris in lucem edita a Christiano Ludovico Scheidio. Göttingen: Sumptibus Guil. Schmidii, Bibliopolae Universitatis, 1749

Folio (244 x 194 mm; uncut). Title printed in red and black with large engraved armorial vignette, one engraved text vignette, 12 large folding engraved plates signed N. Seeländer; a little soiled. Original blue wrappers; worn and soiled. Collector's clamshell box.

First edition of Leibniz’s "great geological classic" (Schuh), published posthumously from his manuscript papers by Christian Ludwig Scheidt. Drawing on his early scientific work in Hanover (1646–1676) and his mining experience in Brunswick-Lüneburg (from 1676), Leibniz sought to reconstruct the primordial history of the earth from “nature’s monuments”—fossils, strata, petrified remains, and mineral formations.

In the Protogaea, Leibniz adopts the Cartesian view that primitive matter possessed a fluid consistency arising from the initial heat of the globe, and that the spherical form of the earth emerged from the aggregation of fundamental “monads.” Rejecting Cartesian momentum, he interprets geological change dynamically, through heat, pressure, sedimentation, and the accretion of mineral layers. Part of the treatise was composed before 1693, and the remainder while Leibniz was active in the mines of the Harz. The plates depict minerals and fossils, a cave cross-section, a Steno’s shark’s head and teeth, fossil shells, a fossil skull, and a mastodon tooth and skeleton.

REFERENCES

Schuh 2951