Wednesday 9 December 2009

Histoire naturelle: générale et particulière, servant de suite á l’histoire des animaux quadrupèdes. Quadrupèdes, Tome Huitième. Par feu M. le Comte de Buffon. Paris: De l’Imprimerie Royale; 1789. Balfour Library class mark: HBD (2) 14

The book is open at: Plate XXXIII, p. 118, “Le grand mongous”. This is a beautiful engraving, apparently of a lemur. The amount of detail in the animal’s fur and limbs is quite impressive. The illustration sits alongside Buffon’s description of the animal. Buffon’s biographer Jacques Roger has observed that his style of writing makes the animals he describes come alive before the reader’s inner eye.

Georges Louis Buffon, 1707–1788, was a French natural philosopher, most famous for his work Histoire naturelle. Originally a mathematician, Buffon gained admission to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1734. By 1739 his writings on organic nature had won him sufficient renown to secure his appointment as keeper of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, a prestigious establishment of museums, gardens and menageries.

Buffon’s interests then turned to geology, chemistry and natural history, and he published his famous work Histoire naturelle. This was a huge project; it was published in fifteen quarto volumes which appeared at intervals over an eighteen-year period from 1749 to 1767. Seven supplementary volumes followed, the last of which did not appear until after Buffon’s death.

Linnaeus had selected one defining characteristic as being of primary significance and thus created a hierarchical classification. Buffon however grouped animals into classes and genera which shared particular characteristics of morphology, anatomy, or behaviour. He described a loose network of similarities and relationships between different classes, genera and species, with some species bridging the gap between classes (e.g. bats bridge the gap between quadrupeds and birds, apes bridge the gap between quadrupeds and man). His system was homocentric and he structured the Histoire naturelle in order to reflect man’s relationship with animals, dealing first of all with domestic animals.

Sources:

Browne, Janet (March 1999) Buffon, Georges Louis. In: Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester http://www.els.net/ [doi:10.1038/npg.els.0002378]

King’s College London libraries, Special Collections Online Exhibition: From the four corners of the earth. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/spec/exhib/allnature/fcorners.html

WOKLER, ROBERT (1998). Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved October 14, 2005, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB010SECT1

See also the full text of the complete works of Buffon on the Buffon et l'histoire naturelle : l'édition en ligne / Histoire Naturelle by Buffon : the web edition website at http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr/