Identifying gaps in knowledge is the first duty of any historian who sets out to understand the past. It is impossible fully to understand our forebears without some idea of what they did not know: the history of ignorance is an indispensable part of history itself.Here Alain Corbin focuses on our planet, exploring its mysteries past and present, and the intensity and eventual decline of the modes of terror and wonder it aroused. For thousands of years, humans knew nearly nothing about the earth. Certain locations on the map simply read 'Terra Incognita'. Corbin recounts the many errors and uncertainties that littered the paths we followed in the attempt to discover the secrets of our blue planet, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the mysteries of volcanoes, the polar regions, glaciers, the stratosphere and the oceans began to be uncovered. While ignorance stimulated our ancestors' imagination, Corbin's history of ignorance reawakens our thirst for knowledge and changes our view of the world.

AcknowledgementsA comprehensive history implies the study of ignorancePart I : Gaps In Enlightenment Knowledge Of The Earth1. The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 17552. The Age of the Earth?3. Imagining the Earth's Internal Structure4. The Mystery of the Poles5. The Unfathomable Mysteries of the Deep Sea6. Discovering Mountains7. Mysterious Glaciers8. A Fascination for Volcanos9. The Birth of Meteorology10. Conquering the Skies11. The State of Scientific Ignorance at the End of the Age of EnlightenmentPart II : A Gradual Decline in Ignorance (1800-1850)12. Understanding Glaciers13. The Birth of Geology14. Volcanoes and the Mystery of 'Dry Fogs'15.The Ocean Depths and the Fear of the Unknown16. Reading Clouds and the Beaufort Scale17.The Poles Remain a Mystery18. The State of Scientific Ignorance in the Early 1860sPart III : Shrinking the Boundaries of Ignorance (1860-1900)19. Exploring the Ocean Depths20. The Development of Dynamic Meteorology21. Manned Flight and the Discovery of the Troposphere and Stratosphere22. Scientific Volcanology and the Birth of Seismology23. Measuring the Grip of Ice24. Solving the Mysteries of Rivers : Fluvialism, Hydrology and Speleology25. A New Approach to Reading the Globe26. Was There Open Sea at the Poles?27. The Earth Sciences Slowly Filter into General Knowledge28. Measuring Ignorance at the Dawn of the Twentieth CenturyNotesIndex