Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

French naturalist

• Born: September 7, 1707
• Birthplace: Montbard, France
• Died: April 16, 1788
• Place of death: Paris, France

Buffon wrote one of the earliest multivolume natural histories that considered nature a coherent entity. He also worked toward a concept of evolution and geological change that contributed to later investigations in the field.

Early Life

The comte de Buffon (kohnt duh bew-foh) was born Georges-Louis Leclerc in the region of Dijon, France, to an upper-middle-class family, where his father was the lord of Buffon and Montbard. He was the eldest of five children and he grew up in a house in Dijon, where his family held an important position in society. Between 1717 and 1723, he attended a nearby Jesuit college, where he showed some promise in mathematics. He then began legal training for three years, a future career suited to his position in society. His career path was interrupted in 1727, when he became close friends with a Swiss mathematics professor and went to Angers to pursue his interest in medicine and botany. His activities during the next four years remain obscure, although there are unsubstantiated reports that he fought a duel and traveled extensively.

Buffon returned to Paris in 1732 and began to make rapid advancement in both political and scientific circles. His mother had died a year earlier and left him a sizable inheritance. Even though his financial future was secured, he devoted a considerable amount of time building on his inheritance and soon became a wealthy man. For the next few years, he directed his attention to areas of mathematics and physics. He wrote a paper on timber strength for the navy and contributed a study on probability theory. In 1734, he was elected as an associate to the French Royal Academy of Sciences, and for the following six years Buffon would follow his interests wherever they led him through a number of different scientific areas. Buffon worked in botany, mathematics, and chemistry, as well as performing microscopic research on animal reproduction. In 1739, he was appointed curator of the Royal Gardens of the king of France. This was a major turning point in Buffon’s life, because from this point on he would concentrate more of his attention on biological and botanical areas. Also by this time, he completed his study of the physics of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), including a translation of Newton’s The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series (1736) in 1740. Throughout his career, Buffon would view nature from a mechanical point of view.

Life’s Work

The comte de Buffon returned to Montbard in 1740 to administer and enlarge his family estates. For the next forty-eight years, he divided his time between his financial concerns and his scientific interests. He spent summers on his estate and returned to his botanical responsibilities in the fall in Paris. During his tenure, he expanded the Royal Gardens extensively and saw them become an important center of scientific research. During this period of his life, he gradually began to publish his forty-four volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-1789; Natural History, General and Particular, 1781-1812). He became a leading scientist of his time and was a member of the many influential scientific societies of Europe. Louis XV made him comte de Buffon and ordered a statue made in his likeness. Although scientific and financial matters seemed to fill his life, he was married to a pretty, twenty-year-old woman in 1752. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1769, when he was left with a five-year-old son.

Buffon’s life’s work is contained in his monumental forty-four-volume natural history. He began work in 1740 on this unprecedented attempt to write a comprehensive history of all the natural sciences. He developed a network of correspondents throughout the world, who sent him summaries of scientific research. In Paris, he organized a team of collaborators, who helped him sort and digest the vast amount of information at hand. The first three volumes of Natural History, General and Particular were published in 1749, and these include titles on the theory of Earth’s history and the history of humankind. These volumes were published by the royal press and hence were not examined by the censors. As a result, their publication brought a storm of protest from the Catholic clergy, who were incensed over Buffon’s rejection of the Genesis view of creation. Yet he could not be considered an atheist; like many other thinkers of the Enlightenment, he remained a Christian despite his rejection of tradition. Indeed, Buffon wrote a retraction, but he then continued to publish volumes in his natural history without swerving from his commitment to scientific investigation.

Periodically throughout his life, volumes of his work would be published. Buffon worked on a series of volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767). These were followed by volumes on birds between 1770 and 1783. A final series on minerals appeared between 1783 and 1788. In addition, there were a number of volumes called supplements, which were published between 1774 and 1789. Among this last group is one of his most famous works on the geological periods of Earth, Époques de la nature (1778; epochs of nature). Taken as a whole, these forty-four volumes make three major contributions to biological sciences: the rejection of a rigid system of identification and classification of biological forms; the opening of a continuing debate on the nature, formation, and diversification of biological species; and the entrance of the concept of evolution into the vocabulary of science through research on anatomy, fossil records, and a vastly extended geologic time.

Buffon began the first volume of his natural history based on the belief in the continuity and unity of nature. He declared in that volume that nature knows only individuals and cannot be placed into logical categories such as classes and genera. This assertion flies in the face of biological classification, which had reached a degree of success and scientific acceptance with the work of Carolus Linnaeus. Linnaeus saw the biological world as discontinuous, each species of organism separately created and placed in the world. For Buffon, each organism was not made according to some ideal design but functioned in the world in a practical manner. Thus, in 1749 Buffon would claim that the classification of organisms was impossible, because it did not take into account the entire organism, only some structural parts. Yet he did not believe that organisms could evolve over time and pass on these traits to future generations. In time, as his knowledge of organisms grew, he would accept classifications of birds and other mammals, but always with the mental reservation that the system was artificial and arbitrary. Having lived a long and active intellectual life, Buffon would often reconsider his earlier conclusions. As a consequence, later commentaries would often disagree as to his precise thoughts on a specific subject.

One major problem in any classification system is that of how to split organisms into various categories: in other words, to identify each separate species or genus as distinct from another one. Linnaeus believed that each species of organism was separately created by God and continued through direct descent to his time. Buffon’s concept of species, when he came to accept this concept, is closer to modern notions than to those of his own time. He argued on the basis of reproduction that those similar individuals that could constantly reproduce over time were a species. He also differed from Linnaeus in another aspect: Buffon thought that physical characteristics were less important than those of habit, temperament, and instinct. Buffon’s ideas on species are closer to later biological descriptions of subspecies and varieties.

Buffon was also probably the first person to open discussion on a large number of questions surrounding evolution. While his answers to these questions were to result in a rejection of the concept of evolution, they nevertheless became part of the scientific literature. In his work Époques de la nature, Buffon attempted to establish a chronology that was vastly different from the accepted one. Biblical interpretation placed the age of Earth at somewhere between 6000 and 4000 b.c.e.; Buffon’s experiments on the cooling of the Earth gave him a figure of seventy-five thousand years. In fact, in his notes he had worked out a figure of three million years, but he thought that he would be misunderstood by his readers. He also proposed a theory of how minerals were transformed by physical and chemical agents and suggested that coal was the product of organic matter. He raised questions regarding sedimentary rocks and fossils within these strata, and this led to questions with regard to the extinction of species. Through his investigations in these areas, Buffon opened the doors for future research that would produce major discoveries in the natural sciences.

Significance

The comte de Buffon was a man of the Enlightenment who believed that rational thought and observation would provide answers to the mysteries of the natural world. He largely rejected the myths of the past and wanted to provide his carefully considered evaluation of the problems of nature. Because he believed that an organism should be treated as a whole, he suggested the possibility of comparative anatomy; the study of behavior followed, since an organism also responded to its environment.

Through his efforts, the attempt to measure the chronology of the Earth became a scientific enterprise on the part of geologists. Buffon had studied the human species by the same methods he applied to other organisms. In one of his volumes, he described the first humans as living on the Earth while the Earth was still hot; thus, they were black and capable of living in tropical temperatures. It was through the use of human intelligence that humans invented fire and tools that enabled them to adapt to all climates. Buffon saw his work as organizing and analyzing facts and following them to a rational and ordered conclusion; this is an intellectual and scientific framework that future investigators would use to advance their own discoveries.

Bibliography

Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 3d ed., rev. and expanded. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Traces theories of human evolution through history. Chapter 3, “Evolution in the Enlightenment,” includes information about Buffon’s concept of evolution.

Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, comte de. Three Hundred and Sixty-Eight Animal Illustrations from Buffon’s “Natural History.” New York: Dover, 1993. Reprints some of the engravings of animals in their natural environments. The illustrations were originally published in Buffon’s compilation of natural history.

Eisley, Loren. Darwin’s Century. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. The section on Buffon is brief and scattered in several parts of the text. Buffon is included in this work to provide the background for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This work is recommended as a general text on eighteenth century natural science, since the author’s writing is highly accessible to the general reader.

Lovejoy, A. O. “Buffon and the Problem of Species.” In Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859, edited by Bentley Glass, O. Temkin, and W. L. Strauss, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959. This article describes in some detail the major problems associated with classification of species and how Buffon’s ideas on species fit with those of his predecessors and of Linnaeus.

Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Written by a leading authority on Darwin and on the history of biological evolution. Each major section contains information on Buffon and his contributions to biology. The material is sometimes difficult, but the treatment is definitive.

Nordenskiöld, Eric. The History of Biology. New York: Tudor, 1928. Chapter 8 of this volume summarizes Buffon’s major contributions. Even though the work is dated, the presentation of the materials is competent and provides useful information.

Roger, Jacques. Buffon: A Life in Natural History. Translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi, edited by L. Pearce Williams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Biography providing a balanced view of Buffon’s life and placing his work within the context of Enlightenment science.

Wilkie, J. B. “The Idea of Evolution in the Writings of Buffon.” Annals of Science 12, nos. 1-3 (1956). This three-part article examines in some detail the questions of how Buffon may have considered the idea of evolution. Even though Buffon would have rejected the modern concept of evolution, there are concepts of transformation of species in Buffon that link him to later developments in evolutionary theory.