In The Shorter Leibniz Texts, edited by Lloyd Strickland, there are a few interesting excerpts from Leibniz’s writings on fossils. (See also Strickland’s translations of Leibniz site here.) Some of these come from the Protegaea, which was published in a bi-lingual edition a couple of years ago and is forthcoming in paperback.

The Protegaea was intended as the preface to his never finished history of the house of Brunswick. It’s an account of the pre-history of the earth. Leibniz changed his mind on fossils, initially suggesting that they were the product of earth processes – ‘tricks of nature’ – before conceding they were the remains of plants and animals.

One of the chapters in my planned next-but-one book – The Space of the World – will probably be entitled ‘fossils’. The idea is that it allows me to look at how fossils challenged older and Biblical accounts of the age of the world, but also because it will provide a way of looking at the claims of Quentin Meillassoux about arche-fossils, and the human-world issue. So, religion and relation, and a reason to return to Leibniz.