Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (Montbard, 1707 – Paris, 1788), was a French naturalist whose work also covered botany, mathematics and cosmology. He lived through the Enlightenment, and his Histoire naturelle attempted to gather the natural knowledge of his day into a single enterprise. His importance lies in having raised questions about the origin and change of living beings and of the Earth, questions that shaped the thinking of Lamarck, Cuvier and, later, Darwin.

The son of a minor official, he studied law in Dijon but soon turned toward science. At Angers he took up mathematics, medicine and botany, and for a time he travelled through Europe in the company of the young Duke of Kingston. In 1734 he entered the Académie des Sciences in Paris for his work on infinitesimal calculus and probability theory, the source of the problem known as Buffon's needle. In 1739 he became director of the Jardin du Roi, which he turned into a research centre and museum, and there he devoted the rest of his life to natural history. The first volumes of the Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749; thirty-six were published during his lifetime and eight more after his death. He left much of the writing on animal species to collaborators, reserving for himself the broad overviews and the grand hypotheses.

In geology, his Histoire et théorie de la Terre (1744) argued that strata had been laid down by water, a view later called Neptunism; he later gave fire a central role as well, and in Les époques de la Nature (1778) he set out seven stages in the history of the planet. In biology he rejected the preformationist view that organisms existed in miniature, proposing instead that living bodies took shape gradually from organic molecules. He also argued for a common plan in the vertebrates and offered a species concept close to the modern one, based on fertility between individuals. His early volumes were condemned by the Sorbonne, and although he published a retraction, he kept printing the same text. Ernst Mayr called him the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century.