Madam, - Hang on. Cormac O'Raifeartaigh's selectivity conveys a false impression (Irishman's Diary, May 12th). The historical search for the true age of Mother Earth has not been confined to those whose mother tongue is English. The Greeks were very interested in the question, and Aristotle reasoned that, to borrow a famous phrase from James Hutton, the 18th-century "Father of Geology", there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end, to Earth and cosmic history. This infinitude would be taken up by William Smith himself more than two millenia later.
In the interim the 14th-century French polymath, Jean Buridan, argued for climatic cycles on a scale of millions of years.
A mere two centuries before Archbishop Ussher's offering, Leonardo da Vinci was calculating that the layers deposited by the Po River in Italy had taken 200,000 years to accumulate. While at the very time of Ussher's burrowings, Frenchman Benoit de Maillet was claiming observational evidence that the age of Earth was in excess of two billion years. A century after Ussher but well before Smith and Darwin, another Frenchman, Jean-Louis Soulavie, argued that the morphology of southern France would have taken millions of years to form. Only a century before Darwin, the Chevalier de Lamarck wrote (I translate): "We can hardly conceive the immensity of our planet's age; this will appear even more immense when we are able to conceive of the origin of living creatures, the causes of their development and improvement to produce all the presently living species of which man is the final result, ifthere be any ultimate result."
Of course, there were errors, often gross, in these early estimates of Earth's age, and errors there were to be in the estimates by Smith, Thomson and Joly. But the point is that the search for scientific truth has not required, as your correspondent largely intimates, that it be pursued and disseminated exclusively through the English language, whatever about flying the flag. - Yours, etc,
PAUL MOHR,
Corrandulla,
Co Galway.