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Updated: May 9, 2025
It should be understood that Mother Maillet had known what real flower-beds were when she was a girl in the Tadousac country. Furthermore, Etienne Provancher always came to the yard o' fine evenings and it served as his little realm; and the door-step of the good woman's house was his throne where he sat in state among his little subjects.
In fact, when the mind has once admitted the conception of the gradual production of the present physical state of our globe, by natural causes operating through long ages of time, it will be little disposed to allow that living beings have made their appearance in another way, and the speculations of De Maillet and his successors are the natural complement of Scilla's demonstration of the true nature of fossils.
For De Maillet not only has a definite conception of the plasticity of living things, and of the production of existing species by the modification of their predecessors; but he clearly apprehends the cardinal maxim of modern geological science, that the explanation of the structure of the globe is to be sought in the deductive application to geological phenomena of the principles established inductively by the study of the present course of nature.
But De Maillet was before his age, and as could hardly fail to happen to one who speculated on a zoological and botanical question before Linnæus, and on a physiological problem before Haller, he fell into great errors here and there; and hence, perhaps, the general neglect of his work.
M. Maillet and M. Dufourny, Belgian Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées, who watched the trials, conclude that a practical solution of the question depends upon the cost of producing the motive power; but they also consider that horse haulage on canals will soon be superseded by mechanical traction, based on the use of an automotive tricycle, working with petroleum or some other hydrocarbon, and capable of running on the tow path without requiring any fixed plant.
But Mother Maillet did not mind because she had no flower-beds and because the palings were off and the youngsters made merry in her yard.
Indeed, the following passage of the preface, in which De Maillet is supposed to speak of the Indian philosopher Telliamed, his alter ego, might have been written by the most philosophical uniformitarian of the present day:
Probably not uninfluenced by these considerations, his Catholic majesty's Consul-General for Egypt kept his theories to himself throughout a long life, for "Telliamed," the only scientific work which is known to have proceeded from his pen, was not printed till 1735, when its author had reached the ripe age of seventy-nine; and though De Maillet lived three years longer, his book was not given to the world before 1748.
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