An Onslaught of Footnotes: How a Geologist Corrected the Errors of a Geographer

Scientific disagreements have long been fought in person, by correspondence, in journals, and in lectures. However, in the 1820s, a disagreement between Malte-Brun, a European geographer, and James Gates Percival, an American geologist, was fought via footnotes, an approach made even more peculiar because Malte-Brun had died, leaving his work incomplete. Attempting to edit Malte-Brun’s Universal Geography, Percival was troubled by the errors, which were due in part to inadequate methodology. On the basis of meticulous fieldwork on volcanism, Percival comprehended the complexity of change. Compelled to correct Universal Geography, he resorted to footnotes marked with the letter P.