Elephant, Mammoth, Unicorn, or What?

Abstract

Picturing new discoveries made by natural philosophers was already a well established practice when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz began to study the history of the earth. In the reconstruction of this savant’s geological endeavours, however, historians of science (and likewise their colleagues in the departments of philosophy) generally have preferred to lend their inner ear to the messages conveyed by Leibnizian texts and to visually ignore the iconic information, as if the sole function ascribed to the latter was that of illustrating propositions believed to be sufficiently telling in themselves. This iconophobic bias is rooted in the belief that iconic information constitutes the redundant apanage of theoretically sound texts. Yet, taking pictures to be eye-catching illustrations turns out to be detrimental to understanding the strategic role which Leibniz attributed to iconic information in the construction of the geological theory he outlined in the (posthumously published) treatise Protogaea.¹ The aim of the present essay is to restore the balance between text and image in Leibniz’ geological research.