Jean-André Deluc (1727-1817) was one of the leading natural

philosophers of the eighteenth century. He was a corresponding

member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the

Royal Society of London, and for a time, Professor of Geology at

the University of Göttingen. But he was not a man of the Enlightenment.

Originally a Genevan democrat close to Rousseau and

an occasional visitor at Voltaire's home in Ferney, he spent the

last half of his long life in the service of the King and Queen of

England and drifted easily and congenially to the right under

their influence. His reputation as a sober and religious philosopher

recommended him for his main assignment, reading natural

philosophy to the pious Queen, who rejoiced to find a francophone

man of science who was not a philosophe. Deluc managed

to combine the strict empiricism of an instrument designer,

experimentalist, and collector of fossils with extravagant speculations

about geology (to adapt a word he invented), meteorology,

and physics, and increasingly problematic schemes for unifying

natural, sacred, and human history. In Jean-André Deluc, Historian

of Earth and Man , J.L. Heilbron, René Sigrist, and their colleagues

trace Deluc's life beginning with his political activities in

Geneva; moving through his career in science and apologetics;

and ending with his service as a British secret agent and his

denunciations of unbelievers, revolutionaries, deists, and

chemists. The man that emerges from this assessment eludes

classification in the usual historiographical categories. His combination

of empiricism and exactness, speculation and romanticism,

shrewdness and self-delusion, science and religion, though

unusual was not unique. His story, as assembled in this book, is

a timely reminder that not all the creators of modern science

were modern scientists.