ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the whole network of influence and initiative that feeds to the central theme, that is the problem of the Figure of the Earth and its place in the Mathematical and Earth Sciences in an evolutionary age. The purpose of the twin expeditions was to determine the Earth's precise shape by measuring the variation of a degree of latitude at points separated as nearly as possible by a whole quadrant of the globe between equator and North Pole. The scene is set at the turn of the eighteenth century, in the politically fraught atmosphere that attended the early years of the Academie Royale des Sciences, the prized creation of Louis XIV and his equivocal concession to modernity. The idea that the spherical Earth was a discovery of the first circumnavigators is, of course, a literary conceit which ignores the whole classical tradition of investigation.
