French naturalist, 1707-1788
The Count of Buffon was one of the two pre-eminent naturalists of the eighteenth century. Though eclipsed by his rival, the great Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus, Buffon wrote with considerably more insight into matters we would now consider the domain of biological anthropology. Additionally, he was a gifted writer as well as a general theorist.
Jean Piveteau, the French paleontologist, has written: "Buffon could be seen as one of the founders of anthropology, that is to say, of the study of man as species and not as individual."
Much of what appears here is from my article
in The History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, from Garland
Press, edited by Frank Spencer (1997).
| Jonathan Marks
Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
|
email: jmarks@email.uncc.edu
phone: (704) 687-2519 fax: (704) 687-3091 |