French naturalist (1707–1788)

The son of wealthy Burgundian landowners, Buffon was born in Montbard; he studied law at Dijon and medicine at Angers. After traveling in Italy and England, he inherited his mother's estate upon her death in 1732. The estate flourished under his direction, benefitting from Buffon's knowledge of sylviculture and the ironworks he installed, thus allowing him to concentrate upon scientific matters.

He began by translating S. Hales's Vegetable Statics (1735) and Newton's The Method of Fluxions (1740) into French. In 1739 he was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi, a post he occupied until his death. Buffon restored, extended, and embellished the institution, which was renamed as the Natural History Museum during the Revolution.

Buffon began work on his Histoire naturelle, a work that would dominate the rest of his life and which would eventually run to 44 volumes. The completed Histoire consisted of:

Vols. 1–15. Quadrupeds, 1749–67, with the assistance of Louis Daubenton who provided the anatomical details.

Vols. 16–24. Birds, 1770–83, with the assistance of the Abbé Bexon and G. de Montbeillard.

Vols. 25–31. Supplementary Volumes. These deal mainly with the quadrupeds, but Vol. 5 (1778) contains Buffon's important Epochs of Nature.

Vols. 32–36. Minerals, 1783–88.

The final 8 volumes, Reptiles (2 vols., 1788–89), Fish (5 vols., 1798–1803), and Cetacea (1804) were prepared by E. de Lacepede.

Vol. 1 contained an influential Preliminary Discourse. Nature, Buffon argued, was a continuum, and any attempts to divide it into apparently natural classes such as cats and dogs were misguided. Only individuals existed in nature; the rest, genera, species, classes and orders were bogus. In accordance with such views Buffon moved in the Histoire, quite artificially, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. He began with Man and familiar domestic animals such as dogs, horses, and cows, before moving on to savage animals. The horse was followed by the dog, not the zebra.

In later volumes of the Histoire Buffon modified these initial extreme views. He conceded that “two animals belong to the same species as long as they can perpetuate themselves,” and also accepted that there did seem to be, beneath superficial differences, “a single plan of structure” present in all quadrupeds. This did not, however, imply a common descent. If, he argued, the ass was derived from the horse, where were the intermediate forms?

Buffon took a bolder line in his Epochs of Nature. He argued against the traditional Biblical chronology of about 6000 years for the Earth's age, claiming instead a period of 78,000 years between the formation of the solar system and the emergence of humans. The estimates were based upon assumptions concerning the rate at which hot bodies of known size and temperature cooled. His calculations allowed him to go further and predict that temperatures will continue to fall, and when they reach 1/25th of the present temperature after 93,000 years, life on Earth will be extinguished.

The French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), wrote the major general work on natural history of the 18th century and made the Royal Garden in Paris a center for scientific research.

On Sept. 7, 1707, Georges Louis Leclerc was born in Montbard, the son of a magistrate in the local sovereign court of justice (parlement). While information regarding Buffon's early career is scant, it is probable that he graduated from the Jesuit college in Dijon and later received a diploma from the Faculty of Law located in Dijon. He was preparing for his father's calling, a career in the law being the expected activity of one of Buffon's particular noble background; but the law never interested him.

Intellectual Apprenticeship

Buffon's first work in the sciences gave little indication of the future naturalist. Evidently having early set as his goal a career in mathematics, he made a close study of various problems in mechanics and paid particular attention to Isaac Newton's new system of the world. Newtonian physics and cosmology were at this time finally displacing the Cartesian system as the focus of French interest in the physical sciences.

During the late 1730s and 1740s Buffon performed notable experiments on the strength of wood and on other aspects of the preparation of forest products. These studies were related to the exploitation of his lands. He read reports to the Academy of Sciences in Paris on various scientific matters and also an occasional mathematical note. It was soon clear, however, that Buffon was not destined to become a mathematician; his talents lay elsewhere. He entered the Academy of Sciences, the center of Parisian scientific activity, in 1733. In 1739 he was appointed director of the Royal Garden (Jardin du Roi; later the Jardin des Plantes). During the years of Buffon's command the Royal Garden stood supreme in France in the study of botany, zoology, chemistry, and mineralogy.

Buffon married Marie Françoise de Saint-Belin Malain in 1752. They had one son, who conducted himself and his financial affairs in such a scandalous manner that he was executed in 1794. With him the direct succession of the family ends.

"Natural History"

The principal product of Buffon's scientific and literary labors was a work of vast magnitude (44 volumes) and exceptional influence. The first volumes of the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière appeared in 1749; the set was completed posthumously in 1804. Not being a field naturalist or a skilled anatomist, Buffon sought an interpretation of nature and clearly felt that, for this purpose, exhaustive enumeration of animal characteristics was of secondary importance. The great value of the Natural History resides in the anatomical descriptions contributed not by Buffon but by his assistants, above all, the classical studies of mammalian anatomy presented by Louis Daubenton.

Catalog of Nature

Buffon distinguished civil history from natural history. "Natural history," he then announced, "is the source of the other physical sciences and mother of all the arts." This was a call to catalog nature, but a catalog singularly unlike, in form and intention, the compendiums traditionally cast by botanists and zoologists, for Buffon was genuinely uninterested in problems of plant and animal classification. It is customary to contrast the Natural History with the publications of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus sought above all a practicable manner of distributing the bewildering diversity of plants and animals into classificatory units (genera, species) which were sharply defined and comprehensible to all.

Linnaeus's System of Nature (1735 and later editions) was thus a remarkable elaboration on traditional practice in natural history. Buffon, however, would have none of this kind of classification. He was impressed by the individuality of nature's productions and even more struck by the fecundity of the productive process itself. He evinced no desire in, and saw no possibility of, forcing nature and its product - the varying host of animals spread over the earth's surface - into the rigid classificatory categories of conventional natural history. In truth, he adopted a general pattern of classification (Mammals, Birds, Reptiles), but that pattern was wholly conventional.

Organic Molecule and Evolution

"Epochs of Nature" (1779) most fully expounds Buffon's cosmological schema and best reveals his speculative genius. Thousands of years ago, Buffon claimed, a passing comet sheared great masses from a molten sun. These masses scattered in space, congealed, and became planets (including the earth) revolving about the sun. At a later date life appeared on earth. The production of life required one of Buffon's most disputed explanatory concepts - organic molecules, minute centers of attractive force and heat which constituted indestructible building blocks for all living organisms. He claimed that the molecules were marshaled to form the various kinds of plants and animals by a totally obscure agent, the internal mold (moule intérièure), and that there was a determinate number of such molds, each related to an individual or species.

Many efforts have been made to represent Buffon as an evolutionist. The complementary ideas of organic molecule and formative molds do not serve this purpose. More germane is Buffon's notorious conception of the dégénération of animals. The principal instance of degeneration was the purported smaller stature and weaker constitution of American animals compared with those of the Old World. He claimed the transforming agents to be climate, nurture, and domestication. But his evidence was, at best, questionable, and the proffered agencies of change no less uncertain. While degeneration was thus a limited idea, it had the great merit of turning attention to the possibility of such changes and, even more so, to the interest and importance of the geographical distribution of animals.

All of these questions impinged upon religious matters. While Buffon evidently satisfied all the outward forms of Christian practice, he almost certainly was a deist in the 1730s and may very well have become an atheist in his later years. He recognized that the wonderful intricacies of nature's productions, especially plants and animals, and the astonishing fertility of natural processes could not be used as evidence of God's existence or of His providential concern and powers. By the 1780s Buffon regarded events in nature as the mere result of blind chance and believed that "nature" itself was no more than an assemblage of regular but probably inscrutable laws. Their delimitation remained the naturalist's foremost task.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Buffon in English. His life and work are recounted in detail in Donald Culross Peattie, Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists (1936), and Alexander B. Adams, Eternal Quest: The Story of the Great Naturalists (1969). A useful study of Buffon's scientific views and their context is J. S. Wilkie's "Buffon, Lamarck and Darwin" in P. R. Bell, ed., Darwin's Biological Work (1959). In French an excellent selection of Buffon's writings and an exhaustive bibliographical guide, including English editions, to all aspects of Buffon's work are in J. Piveteau, Oeuvres philosophiques (1954).

Additional Sources

From natural history to the history of nature: readings from Buffon and his critics, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

For more information on Georges-Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon, visit Britannica.com.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de (1707-88). Often remembered today for his inaugural address to the Académie Française, the Discours sur le style (1753), Buffon was the most prestigious scientist of his day and one of the enduring influences emanating from the French Enlightenment. In the field of scientific erudition he was an entrepreneur of genius, impressive not merely in his practical achievements as superintendant of the Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes) from 1739 until his death, but also in the scope and authority of his literary projects. The Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749-1804) eventually comprised 36 volumes. Produced with a series of collaborators, notably Daubenton, it aimed at a comprehensive account of the cosmological beginnings of the earth, and also of the composition and evolution of organic life. By methodically consolidating knowledge of the natural world the Histoire complemented the Encyclopédie, whose status in publishing history it rivals.

Buffon was born in Montbard into a family of the new nobility. Following legal, medical, and botanical studies, his education was completed in the company of an English nobleman on the Grand Tour (1729-32). Thus his first projects were translations of Evelyn's Sylva and Hales's Vegetable Staticks (1735). Such learned forays were typically reinforced by Buffon's proprietorial interest in forestry. Throughout his career the practical, the profitable, and the scientific were interlinked, subsequent ventures in iron-founding and coal-mining having their cosmological and geological resonance in the theories of the Histoire naturelle and Les Époques de la nature (1778).

The Histoire naturelle, with volumes on cosmology, geomorphology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany, displays an exhaustive conception of natural history. While respecting the tenets of observation and experiment, Buffon's genius lay in synthesizing the findings of others in order to isolate salient principles, and in articulating these with great clarity and precision. He claimed only to assemble facts methodically, and indeed long tracts of the work, notably on ornithology, hardly rise above the mundanely descriptive. Yet while he may be criticized today for the timid anthropocentricity and moralism of his treatment of organic life, he successfully implanted such pregnant hypotheses as marine sedimentation and the evolution of species from primitive prototypes under environmental pressure. In Les Époques de la nature he revised his theories, establishing the classic division of rocks into igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. He also massively expanded the time-scale of terrestrial evolution from its minute biblical span.

Thus, he successfully focused his generation's imagination on the awesome fecundity and interconnection of all natural phenomena. While avoiding direct conflict with the Church, his conception of human nature and origins was unrepentantly heretical. This audacious vision transcends the observational neutrality practised by contemporaries like Réaumur and Bonnet, who criticized him. Modern historians of science applaud him for daring to rescue systematic understanding from their myopic particularism, and above all for endorsing the Cartesian creed of faith in the human mind and in its scientific vocation.

— Sheila Mason

Bibliography

• J. Roger, Buffon: un philosophe au jardin du roi (1989)

(zhôrzh lwē ləklĕrk' kôNt də büfôN') , 1707–88, French naturalist and author. From 1739 he was keeper of the Jardin du Roi (later the Jardin des Plantes) in Paris and made it a center of research during the Enlightenment. He devoted his life to his monumental Histoire naturelle (44 vol., 1749–1804), a popular and brilliantly written compendium of data on natural history interspersed with Buffon's own speculations and theories. Of this work, the volumes Histoire naturelle des animaux and Époques de la nature are of special interest. His famous Discours sur le style was delivered (1753) on his reception into the French Academy. He also contributed to the mathematics of probability.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc (1707–1788), natural historian. Born to an aristocratic family in Montbard (Burgundy), where he also received his early education, Buffon was originally directed toward a bureaucratic career common for his class. A chance meeting with a young English nobleman in 1738 led to a continental tour through France, Italy, and England. During this year-long sojourn, Buffon studied natural history and the new philosophical positions of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the influential English natural philosopher and was exposed to the work of John Ray (1627–1705), England's most important naturalist. When he returned to France, Buffon published translations of one of Newton's works along with a work on botany by Stephen Hales (1677–1761), and his new interest in the sciences was clear.

Privileged economically by birth, Buffon then turned his attention exclusively to natural philosophy. By 1739 he was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences and then appointed to direct the Jardin du Roi (now Jardin des Plantes) in Paris. As director, Buffon established himself as one of the most influential natural historians of the eighteenth century, one of the most important figures of the French Enlightenment, and one of the most politically and administratively powerful individuals in the French bureaucracy prior to the Revolution.

Buffon's first task at the Jardin was to build its collections and expand its physical size. Once these tasks were well underway, he dedicated himself to a large writing project, his multivolume work Histoire naturelle, générale, et particulière (1749–1788, 1789), along with a shorter introductory work describing the natural development of the Earth, Les époques de la nature (1778). Buffon's written work established him as the leading contributor to a thoroughly naturalistic interpretation of the formation of the Earth and all its botanical and zoological residents. His literary productions, lavishly illustrated and featuring the engaging and humanistic style common among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, led to the spread of his fame throughout Europe, England, and the United States. By the end of his life, he had been elected as a member to most learned societies throughout the western world.

It is difficult to provide a simple description of Buffon's ideas about the natural world, since they developed over the course of his career. But essentially, Buffon attempted to adopt a Newtonian approach to natural history. That is, he aspired to describe the workings of nature as being under the control of natural forces. Although the exact nature of the forces was unknown, naturalists could observe their action through the effects they produced; that is, through the formation of the multitude of geological forms, botanical specimens, and zoological beings. With these force concepts, Buffon was completely freed from reliance on catastrophic events occurring over a short period of time, or miraculous events within the natural world, or to teleological explanations especially steeped in religious doctrine or divine intervention. His system was completely and unabashedly naturalistic and dynamic.

Central to Buffon's system for plants and animals was the notion of the moule intérieur, loosely defined as internal mold or pattern. This was a force concept he borrowed self-consciously from Newton. As such, it controlled the organization and operation of each specific organism. Thus, a horse took on the form and behavior of horses because it was endowed with "horse" moule intérieur. Just as gravity always produced the same result when it operated upon the same material, so Buffon's notion created order and regulation for nature's organic production. In practice, however, Buffon's ideas proved to be more problematic. Completely opposed to the fixed system of nature proposed by his Swedish contemporary, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), he ultimately was unable to describe systematically how the moule intérieur operated. Was this on the level of the individual species or was it on a higher level of organization? In other words, were all horses the same species or did a specific moule explain the great variation between the Shetland pony and the Arabian horse?

Despite problems in applying his philosophical system to the collections at the Jardin, Buffon exerted a tremendous influence over natural history in the eighteenth century, an influence that lasted well into the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). After Buffon, it became impossible for naturalists to refer uncritically to nonnatural explanations for natural phenomena. Basing his philosophical position on the epochal work of Newton, Buffon demonstrated successfully that the natural world was a world controlled by natural forces, from the workings of the tides to the production of species. His arguments, presented in an elegant writing style, elevated Buffon to one of the most prominent positions in eighteenth-century science.

Bibliography

Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.

Roger, Jacques. Buffon: A Life in Natural History. Translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi and edited by L. Pearce Williams. Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.

—KEITH R. BENSON

Quotes:

"Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience."

"Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on; Hold fast; Hold out. Patience is genius."

"The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production."

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