Buffon's legacy was the monumental Natural History, written in sufficiently lucidprose that it was comprehensible to non-specialists, and consequently widely discussed in the salons of the day.  Under the original 1745 proposal, Daubenton (better known in physical anthropology as the source of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's 1795 genus name for the aye-aye) would be responsible for the anatomy; Buffon for the actual product. The first three volumes were actually published in1749.  Volume I contained a radical "Theory of the Earth" which postulated an evolutionary origin for the planet, similar in principle to ideas which were being suggested by Kant, and by various English geologists.  Buffon's views, however, became the subject of a 14 point inquiry by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne.  He avoided censure by publishing a recantation of these ideas in Volume IV (1753), in ten paragraphs.  This is particularly interesting, however, insofar as the first paragraph was quoted verbatim by Charles Lyell, in the first volume of Principles of Geology (1830, p. 48):
 

I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact; and I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narration of Moses.

It is at least conceivable that Buffon's recantation, with emphasis added by Lyell, may have suggested to Darwin (who took Lyell's first volume to South America on the Beagle) the response that his own unorthodox theory might receive, and perhaps contributed to Darwin's long delay in publishing it. The publication in 1767 of the fifteenth volume marked the end of the first phase of Buffon's encyclopedic work. Daubenton withdrew from collaboration on the Natural History, after Buffon decided to omit Daubenton's anatomical descriptions in a reprint of the work. It is unclear whether the break was precipitated by Daubenton's vanity, Buffon's vanity (a belief that the anatomy was weighing down the work), or a broader philosophical disagreement between the two: Buffoninclining towards historical approaches to the subject, and Daubenton towards static morphology (Farber, 1975).  Daubenton's work in later volumes was picked up by Gueneau de Montbeillard and Abbot Bexon.  Buffon would publish seven volumes of supplements to Natural History of the Quadrupeds, the last posthumously, in 1789, but his focus now shifted from quadrupeds to birds (9 volumes, published from 1770-1783) and minerals (5 volumes, published from 1783-1788).  The eight volumes on fish, cetaceans, and reptiles were predominantly the work of Lacépède, and comprised the last of the 44 quartovolumes of the work.
 

• George-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon
• Buffon's Life
• Natural History, General and Particular
• Buffon's Biology
• Buffon as Crypto-evolutionist
• Buffon and Biological Anthropology
• References and additional sources

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Jonathan Marks Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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email: jmarks@email.uncc.edu phone: (704) 687-2519 fax: (704) 687-3091