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Teaching Popular Geography to Nonspecialists in early 19th Century Paris

This lithographed wall chart was first issued in 1832 and reissued several times, including the 1834 fourth edition offered here. The chart combines dense explanatory text with a vividly hand-tinted cross section of the Earth’s crust.

Printed in color on a single sheet, the plate was designed to fold for field use or hang in a study. About half of the surface is reserved for dense explanatory prose that frames two “big questions”: (1) When and how was the world created? and (2) What has happened to Earth from its origin to the present? Below this text, a vividly tinted cross-section presents a theoretical slice of the planet from incandescent core to thinning atmosphere, intended as a portable synopsis of Nérée Boubée’s popular geology course.

The horizontal axis reads left to right as a time line that compresses 300,000 years of Earth history into four Cuvier-inspired epochs: a pre-organic era, the age of marine life and plants, the age of quadrupeds, and the recent epoch of humankind. The vertical axis intertwines time and space, exaggerating crustal thickness so viewers can see strata accumulate, buckle, and pierce upward as rose-colored plutonic intrusions—graphic evidence of Pierre Cordier’s central-heat cooling theory. A narrow blue band caps the section, noting how atmosphere height, density, and chemical complexity diminish as the planet cools. Boubée’s directional narrative rejects a strict return to earlier states: geology, he writes, explains what the globe should become if natural laws remain constant, while admitting “unforeseen cataclysms” could alter that trajectory.

Color keys and numbered callouts identify primary, transition, secondary, and tertiary rocks, volcanic necks, mineral lodes, and fossil horizons. Marginal tables list characteristic fossils, tectonic processes, and economic deposits for each epoch, letting students relate abstract layers to concrete field evidence. By condensing both spatial and temporal scales into a single graphic, the chart exemplifies the “visual language of geology” that, as historian Silvia F. de M. Figueirôa notes, made deep time cognitively and materially accessible to nonspecialists in the 1830s.

Sold for 1.5 to 7 francs depending on paper quality, the Tableau functioned as an inexpensive teaching aid—“a course that folds,” according to its creator. Its success spawned three revised printings in 1832 alone and a reduced version that prefaces every edition (and translation) of Boubée’s best-selling Géologie élémentaire appliquée à l’agriculture et à l’industrie (1833). Copies circulated to the Geological Society of London and into William Buckland’s library at Oxford, attesting to its international reach. More than a curiosity, the chart captures a transitional moment in earth science when French “causes actuelles” methodology tempered catastrophist and strict uniformitarian extremes, presenting viewers with a visually compelling, forward-looking history of a cooling, ever-changing Earth.

Simon Suzanne Nérée Boubée (1806 – 1862) was a French naturalist, entomologist, geologist, author, and educator who taught in Paris and belonged to the Société entomologique de France. Driven by the conviction that “science should be spread for all,” Boubée became one of nineteenth-century France’s most energetic popularizers of geology. He offered both private and free public courses and devoted particular effort to making the vast spatial and temporal scales of Earth history comprehensible to nonspecialists. Between 1831 and 1839 he issued a suite of foldable, vividly illustrated teaching charts—among them the Tableau mnémonique des terrains primitifs (1831), Tableau de l’état du globe à ses différents âges (1832), the field guide Deux Promenades au Mont-Doré (1834), and the Tableau figuratif de la structure minérale du globe (1839). These visual aids compressed complex stratigraphic and chronological data into portable formats that helped students grasp geology’s intertwined spatial and temporal dimensions.

French geology in the 1820s-1830s balanced catastrophist ideas popularized by Georges Cuvier with emerging uniformitarian views championed in Britain by Charles Lyell. Boubée’s chart leans toward catastrophism: it highlights worldwide “diluvial” events and depicts volcanism as a primary driver of crustal upheaval. At the same time, it organizes Earth history into progressive biological stages, echoing continental debates about deep time and the succession of life well before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). The Société Géologique de France had formed only four years earlier (1830), and printed syntheses like Boubée’s helped spread professional research to broader, increasingly literate audiences during France’s July Monarchy.

Rarity

Boubee's charts are very rare. 

OCLC locates the following examples:

• 1832 (Bibliotheque National de France; Paris-Museum Histoire Naturelle)
• 1835 (Paris-Museum Histoire Naturelle; Bibliotheque Cantonale et Universitaire) identified as 4th Edition
• 1852?:  (CSIC - Spain) -- identified as 4th Edititon 

OCLC does not locate any examples dated 1834.