IF YOU HAD to select the least convivial scientific field trip of all time, you could certainlydo worse than the French Royal Academy of Sciences’ Peruvian expedition of 1735. Led by ahydrologist named Pierre Bouguer and a soldier-mathematician named Charles Marie de LaCondamine, it was a party of scientists and adventurers who traveled to Peru with the purposeof triangulating distances through the Andes.

At the time people had lately become infected with a powerful desire to understand theEarth—to determine how old it was, and how massive, where it hung in space, and how it hadcome to be. The French party’s goal was to help settle the question of the circumference ofthe planet by measuring the length of one degree of meridian (or 1/360 of the distance aroundthe planet) along a line reaching from Yarouqui, near Quito, to just beyond Cuenca in what isnow Ecuador, a distance of about two hundred miles.

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