Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de

« space ( Wolff, C. ; Newton, I. ). Supposing that the planets had been formed from the impact of comets with the sun, he argued that the topography of the earth was attributable to the effects of erosion.

Just as civil history records the epochs of the revolutions of human affairs and the occurrence of moral events, so does natural history record the physical development and transformations of the world, he claimed.

In his creation of heaven and earth, God had made only the matter of the universe.

The earth's consolidation, with the introduction of water, the birth of volcanoes, the separation of continents, the generation of animals and the emergence of the human race, constituted the history of all organic substance, which Buffon was to term les époques de la nature in the most celebrated volume of his work, bearing that title, published in 1778.

From his manuscripts it appears that he supposed the earth might be 3 million years old, but in print he allowed only a total of around 75,000 years. 3 His notion of a species Buffon's early interest in mathematics had included research in infinitesimal calculus, a subject which accorded well with the ancient doctrine to which he subscribed, of a natural chain of being, or scala naturae , linking all vegetables and animals by a series of gradations of their physical form.

In part because he accepted that Nature's ladder consisted of unbroken steps, each in its place from the start, Buffon doubted the central premise of what would become evolutionary or Darwinian biology, according to which one species generates another.

Along lines corresponding to Plato's theory of Forms, he even maintained that, because species are perpetual and permanent, they comprise the only true beings in Nature.

Each individual organism, or what is now termed a 'phenotype' , he thought, was patterned by the molécule organique or moule intérieur of its prototype - which today would be termed the 'genotype' of its species as a whole. But Buffon's conception of each species' form was more dynamic than that of any philosopher of nature before him.

The most striking difference between the world's animal and vegetable matter, he claimed, is the power of movement possessed by animals alone, allowing for the fact that some animals, such as oysters, lack that power as well.

Buffon noted that individual members of species may be altered or improved by climate or nourishment, and he therefore stressed that the phenotypes of organisms were marked by their differences or variability.

Permanence or fixity, however, was generically inherent in every species, he insisted.

Contending that Nature is in continual flux, he perceived the diverse instantiations of species as either improving or degenerating according to their circumstances, a point which he illustrated most strikingly with respect to the flora and fauna of the New World as contrasted with the Old, in so far as he deemed the North American puma to be a diminutive lion and the South American llama just a small camel. The crucial factor which determined the nature of a species, according to Buffon, was not physical resemblance of bodily parts, as in Linnaeus' taxonomy, but procreative ability - a species being defined as a constant succession of. »