Knowledge From Underground: Leibniz Mines the Enlightenment

Abstract

The history of geology has focused largely on the foundations of geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considerable attention has also been given to grand theories of the earth, or cosmogonies, of the seventeenth century. This approach has left out most of eighteenth-century mineralogy; it has also left out mining. The argument here is that Leibniz's Protogaea is best understood in the context of the Harz mines, where Leibniz spent considerable energy doing administrative work and inventing new mining machinery. By looking to the mines we not only make sense of Protogaea, but of most of German mineralogy in the eighteenth century. J. G. Lehmann, J. F. W. Charpentier, C. G. Delius and many other practitioners working in and around mines were deeply concerned with mapping the subterranean structure of the earth's crust and they contrasted their work with the "fantastic" world of theorists. The Freiberg Mining Academy, other institutions, and the way vocabularies of mining changed will also be considered. Finally there are some concluding thoughts on why mining has almost disappeared from the history of geology.