Buffon, GEORGE LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE, was born at Montbard, in Burgundy, on September 7, 1707. His father was a rich man, belonging to the noblesse de robe. After studying law at the Jesuit college in Dijon, he devoted himself wholly to science. At Dijon he became acquainted with an English nobleman, Lord Kingston, with whom he went on a tour through France and Italy, and in whose company he visited England. While in England he translated into French Newton's Fluxions, Hales's Vegetable Statics, and a work on agriculture by Tull. On returning to France he soon gained distinction as a writer on scientific subjects, and after being admitted to the Academy, was in 1739 appointed director of the Jardin du Roi, a post which gave him command of the royal museums and collections of living animals and plants. He then formed the design of his Histoire Naturelle, in which all the known facts of natural science were to be embodied and discussed in what he believed to be language of the loftiest eloquence. In producing the fifteen volumes of the Histoire, which appeared between 1749 and 1767, he was assisted by Daubenton, the Abbé Bexon, Guesneau de Montbéliard and others, whom he intrusted with the compilation of facts, and the composition of the less ambitious passages. The work brought him an immense reputation, and was translated into most of the languages of Europe. Its rhetorical flights were regarded with extravagant admiration; Rousseau, who visited Buffon at the chateau of Montbard, is said to have fallen on his knees and kissed the doorstep of the pavilion in which parts of the book were composed. Montesquieu, D'Alembert, and Voltaire, however, formed a different estimate of its author's ability. Though he may be ranked among the philosophes, Buffon was not one of the leaders or militant members of the party. After receiving various high honours, he was made Comte de Buffon by Louis XV. He died at Paris on April 16, 1788. Buffon, it has been said, completely exemplified his own phrase: Le style c'est l'homme. He was as pompous in his manners as in his writings. He regarded himself as a supreme authority on all that related to literary form; his remark, however, that certain verses which he happened to admire were as beautiful as beautiful prose, illustrates his thorough misunderstanding of the principles of sound criticism. After being greatly overrated, his work is now, perhaps—at least out of France—somewhat unfairly disparaged. He was rash and over-confident in his speculations; his book has no longer any scientific value; much that he wrote and that once passed for soaring eloquence is now recognised as fustian. But he was inspired by a genuine love of knowledge. He sought to invest natural science with new dignity and interest in the eyes of the world at large, and he undoubtedly achieved his object. He may claim a place in the history of the doctrine of evolution, from having opposed the old system of zoological classification, on the ground that an unbroken succession of forms could be traced through the animal kingdom.
See Richard's edition of his Œuvres complètes (1825–28), his Correspondance (2 vols. 1860); Flourens, Buffon; Histoire de ses Travaux et de ses Études (1844); Nadault de Buffon, Buffon, sa Famille et ses Familiers (1863); and the Life by Lebasteur (1889).