ABSTRACT
Although in eighteenth-century France there was no organized study of landforms, there was considerable interest in the subject which often appeared incidentally or as part of other work (Ellenberger 1986). We have already praised Desmarest (see volume 1, p. 17) and other eighteenth-century French scientists who made notable advances in hydrology and hydraulics. Outstanding among them were Henri Pitot, Charles Bossut (see volume 1, pp. 87-8) and Louis Gabriel Du Buat whose Principes d’ Hydraulique (1779, 1786), verified by numerous experiments made on behalf of the government, was for long a valued text (see volume 1, pp. 86-93). In the next century this hydraulic tradition was continued notably by the civil engineer Alexandre Surell in his Etude sur les Torrents des Hautes-Alpes (1841), which contains a clear description of the concept of ‘grade’ in the long profile of mountain streams (see volume 1, pp. 283-7). The conjunction of hydraulics and geology appears in a small book entitled Hydrogéologie (1802) by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) (see volume 1, pp. 81-2), a prolific author who is more famous for his writings on botany, invertebrate zoology, palaeontology and the theory of evolution. His book is subtitled, in the recent translation, ‘Researches on the influence which waters exert on the surface of the terrestrial globe; on the reasons for the existence of ocean basins, for their displacement and successive migration over the different points of the globe’s surface; finally on the changes that living bodies exercise upon the nature and state of that surface’. The approach was essentially that of Hutton and is strongly uniformitarian, the volume being merely a part of a longer planned work on terrestrial physics.
