Comte de buffon pronunciation

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Comte de Buffon

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 7 September 1707-16 April 1788, French naturalist.

Buffon, born George-Louis LeClerc (the name Buffon was inherited with an from his mother when he was twenty-five), was born in Montbard, France, the son of a Burgundian state official, and attended the Jesuit College of Godrans in Dijon. In 1723 he followed his father's advice and began to study law, but in 1728 he went to Angers to study mathematics, medicine, and botany. In the early 1730s, Buffon traveled with his friend, the Duke of Kingston, and during their stay in England, Buffon was elected a member of the Royal Society.

Shortly thereafter he was recalled to France, where he pursued research in probability and botany, and published translations of Stephen Hales's Vegetable Staticks (1735) and Isaac Newton's Fluxions (1740).

Buffon was appointed keeper of the French Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes) in 1739, an impressive royal post for someone only thirty-two years old. His patron, J.-F.-P. de Maurepas, then commissioned him to catalogue all the roya

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788)

Sometimes it is hard to imagine how revolutionary an idea was, especially when that idea is currently accepted as common knowledge. Many such ideas appear simple and are often taught at the elementary school level, yet the simplicity of these ideas belies the complexity involved in their origins.

During the eighteenth century, two church doctrines provided sweeping biblical explanations for most questions about biological diversity: Separate Creation, the idea that all creatures have been created independently of one another by God and organized into a hierarchy ("chain of being") with Man occupying the most elevated rank beneath God; and the 6,000 year limit on the age of the planet.

It is not the average person who questions two thousand years of dogma, but that is what Buffon did: 100 years before Darwin, Buffon, in his Historie Naturelle, a 44 volume encyclopedia describing everything known about the natural world, wrestled with the similarities of humans and apes and even talked about common ancestry of Man and apes.

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Comte de Buffon

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, French naturalist.

Buffon spelled out his views in his monumental Natural History (Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière), an attempt to present systematically all the known facts of natural science, of which the first volumes appeared in 1749 and the final volumes in 1804.

Buffon rejected Linnaeus's method of classifying species, insisting instead on smooth gradations between not only species but individual organisms. Although he was willing to use anatomical structures to make working distinctions between species, he believed any division into orders, classes, genera, and species misrepresented the variety of nature.

His own experiments, however, caused him to think seriously about the idea of the species. Buffon discovered that animals of different species could be crossbred, but the offspring were infertile: he therefore defined a species as a group of animals that could produce fertile offspring.

Buffon did believe in the idea of the mutation of species, and was the firs