GEORGES BUFFON 1707 - 1788  (AN, G1, G2, G3a)

xxxxxThe French naturalist Georges Buffon was born in Montbard, Burgundy. His original name was Leclerc but he adopted the name Buffon from an estate his mother left him when he was about 18. He was educated at the Jesuit College in Dijon and then began to study law. In 1728, however, he gave this up and went to Angers. It was here that he first showed an interest in botany and mathematics. Obliged to leave there after taking part in a duel, he went to Nantes where he teamed up with a young Englishman. They travelled to Italy and England, but he returned to France on the death of his mother and lived on the family estate at Montbard. It was here that he acquired an interest in forestry, and it was partly due to his knowledge of timber that in 1739 he was appointed director of the Jardin du Roi (now the French botanical gardens), and of the museum within its grounds.

xxxxxOne of the requirements of this appointment was that he should compile a catalogue of the royal collections in natural history. This proved the start of something big. Not content with the somewhat limited scope of this assignment, he decided to cover the whole of the natural world. Thus it was that in 1749 he embarked upon a monumental task which became his life's work over the next 40 years. The result of his labours, his Natural History, eventually ran to 44 volumes and was not completed until 1804. Buffon, together with his collaborators, managed to produce 36 of them. The finished work was the first systematic attempt to bring together all the data acquired over the years in the fields of natural history, anthropology and geology. It contained hundreds of detailed descriptions and exquisite illustrations - including many exact anatomical drawings - of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and minerals.

xxxxxIt was, of necessity, a collaborative work, though Buffon remained the chief author. The first 15 volumes appeared in 1767. Interesting in content and well written, they proved highly popular. The next seven volumes added to the material already published, and they were followed by nine volumes on birds (1770-83) and five volumes on minerals (1783-88). Thexmajor contributors were the French naturalists Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716-1799) and the Comte de Lacépède, (1756-1825), and they were also the ones who completed the work - eight volumes on reptiles, fish and cetaceans - after Buffon's death in 1788. (Lacépède also produced his own work A Natural History of Fishes, a five volume work begun in 1798 and completed in 1803.)

xxxxxAs one might expect, such a colossal undertaking was not likely to escape controversy, and it was not long in coming. In the opening volumes Buffon threw doubt on the whole theory of creation by suggesting - having seen signs of mutation (change) - that life in some species, at least, had evolved and had not been spontaneously generated as the Bible implied. In 1751 the Sorbonne (the University of Paris) condemned this suggestion, and Buffon was required to repudiate any statement which ran counter to the Earth's origins as laid out in the book of Genesis. This he did, but it is clear that his findings - crude though they were - anticipated the theories of evolution later put forward by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and the English naturalist Charles Darwin. However, such deductions totally escaped Buffon at this time. Indeed, despite his findings, he believed that, as in spontaneous generation, there existed what he termed "vital atoms" which were responsible for generating life.

xxxxxA further questioning of biblical authority came in 1778 with the publication of the volume entitled The Epochs of Nature. Here, Buffon disputed the age of the Earth as calculated from bible teaching. Based on the cooling rate of iron, he argued that the Earth was not 6,000 but 74,832 years old. This vast increase was still well short of the mark, but it did open the whole question of time scale, paving the way for the introduction of geological eras.

xxxxxTo lighten his work, Buffon interspersed his detailed study of nature with personal comments on a wide range of subjects. He put forward the idea, for example, that Siberia had been the cradle of life, and he annoyed a large number of Americans - not least Thomas Jefferson - by his assertion that the harsh climate of the New World stunted the growth of its inhabitants! (an idea he later discarded). And speculating on the origin of the earth, he concluded that the planets might well have been formed by the collision of a comet with the sun. Understandably, perhaps, many of the ideas he put forward in his Natural History were openly criticised, be it by cleric, scientist or philosopher, but nonetheless his vast study earned him a great deal of respect. He was, for example, a close friend of both Denis Diderot and D'Alembert, though he did not collaborate in their Encyclopédie. Furthermore, in his day, he made the Jardin du Roi an important centre of biological research, and his wide-ranging research paved the way for the work of his fellow countryman and naturalist Georges Baron Cuvier. In 1773 Louis XV made him a count.

xxxxxBut Buffon did not confine all his efforts to natural history. Always a keen mathematician, during his early years of study at Montbard, he carried out research into the calculus of probability and, in translating into French Isaac Newton's Fluxions in 1740, discussed in some detail Newton's dispute with Gottfried Leibniz over the discovery of infinitesimal calculus. And in 1748, remarkable man that he was, he also found time to assist in the development of lenses, making an improvement that was later adopted by Augustin-Jean Fresnel when constructing lenses for use in lighthouses.

xxxxxIncidentally, you may recall that some of the dinner services produced at the French porcelain factory at Sèvres were decorated with bird illustrations taken from The Natural History of Birds, one of the volumes of Buffon's vast study of nature. Below are four pages from this huge work.

Acknowledgements

Buffon: by the French painter François-Hubert Drouais (1727-1775), 1753 – Musée Buffon, Montbard, France. Spallanzani: date and artist unknown. Pallas: silhouette by the 18th century artist A. Tardier – contained in the 1952 edition of Russian Biologists and Evolutionists Before Darwin, by the Russian historian Boris Raikov (1880-1966).

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xxxxxThe theory of spontaneous generation raised by Buffon was the subject of research by an Italian physiologist at this time, Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). In 1767, by conducting a series of experiments under strict laboratory conditions, he discredited the theory, then widely held, that life could generate from nonliving matter, a theory vaguely supported by Buffon's belief in the existence of "vital atoms" as the means of regenerating life. But, as we shall see, despite such evidence, the idea of spontaneous generation died hard, and was not really laid to rest until the work of the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur in the mid-19th century.

xxxxxBorn in Modena in northern Italy, Spallanzani was educated in law at Bologna University, but later turned to the study of science. After working at Modena University, he became professor of physics at the University of Pavia in 1769. It was here that he carried out most of his experiments and earned his place as one of the founders of experimental biology.

xxxxxHis research was conducted over a wide field of biological interest. In 1771, for example, while examining a chick embryo, he discovered the vascular connections between veins and arteries, and monitored the effects of growth on the circulation of blood. He also made a special study of the circulation of the blood through the lungs and other organs, explained the cause of the arterial pulse, and examined the properties of the digestive juices. Other research included a detailed examination of semen in an attempt to discover what part of its make-up was specific to generation, and an investigation into the ability of many lower animals to regenerate superficial parts of their bodies. He also performed some successful transplant operations - notably on snails - , and was one of the first to carry out artificial insemination experiments on animals. He shared Buffon's interest in the migration of birds, and carried out research into the flight of bats and the electrical discharge of the torpedo fish.

xxxxxAxcontemporary of Georges Buffon and Carl Linnaeus was the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811). He published his Elenchus zoophytorum, a classification of corals and sponges in 1766, and the following year was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to teach at St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. From there he made visits to Siberia and southern Russia and collected a vast number of specimens of plants, mammals, birds and insects, many of which were unknown to science. He began a catalogue of the plants and animals of Russia, but was unable to complete the work.