Maillet, Benoît de (c. 1656–1738)

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MAILLET, BENOÎT DE
(c. 1656–1738)

Benoît de Maillet was a French diplomat, traveler, and natural scientist. Information concerning the place and date of his birth, details of his life, and the significance of his works is, at best, sketchy and contradictory. A member of the impoverished nobility, Maillet presumably received the customary classical education of the day. He seems to have led an apathetic existence until his appointment to the French consulate in Cairo at the age of thirty-six. As consul, he handled the king's business well and, for services rendered, was named ambassador to Ethiopia in 1702. He declined the honor, ostensibly for reasons of health but actually because his duties would be less concerned with Franco-Ethiopian relations than with the formidable task of converting the natives to Christianity. In 1707, at his own request, he left his post in Cairo to assume charge of the French consulate in Livorno, Italy. He was so successful as consul and later as inspector of French settlements in other parts of the Mediterranean that, upon his retirement in 1724, he received a handsome pension and spent the remaining fourteen years of his life in Marseille. There, besides attending to a large correspondence, most of which is now lost, he wrote several works, including Description de l'Egypte (1735) and the vastly more important Telliamed, ou entretiens d'un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois (1748), which appeared posthumously.

Telliamed

The years of Maillet's consulships, his travels in the Mediterranean basin, and his wide readings and careful observations formed much of the background for Telliamed (the author's name spelled backward). First published in Amsterdam, it was closely followed by other editions in both French and English, the most important being that of the Abbé Le Mascrier (1755). The work consists of a series of conversations in which Maillet, speaking through his Indian philosopher, Telliamed, puts forth various geological and biological speculations about Earth's cosmogony and its evolution—together with the organic beings it supported—into its present state. According to Maillet's system, Earth, product of a whirlpool of cosmic dust, was for countless ages entirely covered with swirling waters. As the waters gradually receded, the primordial mountains formed by the currents of these waters slowly emerged from the depths. The crashing of the waves against these mountains formed new mountains, and with the appearance of life in the seas, fossil strata were formed.

Primitive forms of aquatic life, produced in ever-increasing abundance through the aeons, underwent gradual modifications of structure and function in keeping with changing habits and new environments. Thus, creatures along the shallow coastal waters moved into the marshes and, after much trial and error, finally emerged with wings for flying or legs for walking. Beneath this speculation lay the work's basic theme that everything in the universe, through the processes of time, was undergoing constant change. Occasionally the author's boldly imaginative thought resulted in whimsy, which was interpreted by many of his critics as folly or childish fantasy.

Telliamed immediately became a center of controversy that extended well into the nineteenth century. Maillet's heretical views, which ran counter to the tenets of Genesis, aroused the theologians of the day, while many eighteenth-century rationalists and scientists, led by Voltaire, were violently opposed to his ideas on other grounds. Disparaging criticisms continued in the writings of such eminent men of science as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier, Nonetheless, Comte de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Chevalier de Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, among others, availed themselves of Maillet's theories as a starting point for even more daring concepts of their own.