Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, avec la Description du Cabinet du Roi. Georges-Louis Leclerc BUFFON, Comte de
First edition, a fine and absolutely complete copy in unrestored contemporary French calf, of this monumental work, “the most celebrated treatise on animals ever produced” (Dibner), but also including treatises on cosmology, geology and palaeontology. This copy was almost certainly bound for a member of the Royal family. All volumes have the arms of Louis XVI on the covers and in the spine panels – we have found only one other copy with these arms on the covers and spines, namely that in the Bibliothèque nationale, which was bound in red morocco, presumably for the King himself. Buffon “was the first to present the universe as one complete whole and to find no phenomenon calling for any but a purely scientific explanation” (PMM). “Buffon’s work is of exceptional importance because of its diversity, richness, originality, and influence. Buffon was among the first to create an autonomous science, free of any theological influence. He emphasized the importance of natural history and the great length of geological time. He envisioned the nature of science and understood the roles of paleontology, zoological geography, and animal psychology. He realised both the necessity of transformism and its difficulties” (DSB). This work also represents the birth of evolutionary theory. “Georges Buffon set forth his general views on species classification in the first volume of his Histoire Naturelle. Buffon objected to the so-called ‘artificial’ classifications of Andrea Cesalpino and Carolus Linnaeus, stating that in nature the chain of life has small gradations from one type to another and that the discontinuous categories are all artificially constructed by mankind. Buffon suggested that all organic species may have descended from a small number of primordial types; this is an evolution predominantly from more perfect to less perfect forms” (Parkinson). “It is a great pity that his [Buffon’s] ideas were scattered and diffused throughout the vast body of his Natural History with its accounts of individual animals. Not only did this concealment make his interpretation difficult, but it lessened the impact of his evolutionary ideas … However, almost everything necessary to originate a theory of natural selection existed in Buffon. It needed only to be brought together and removed from the protective ecclesiastical coloration which the exigencies of his time demanded” (Eiseley, p. 45). In addition to its comprehensive coverage of natural history (including mankind) and minerals, the work incorporates in the first volume Buffon’s highly important Théorie de la terre, elaborated in the fifth volume of the Supplément as Des Époques de la nature – these treatises contain Buffon’s theory that the earth was created by a collision between the sun and a comet, the first attempt to reconstruct geological history in a series of stages, and his notion of ‘lost species’, which opened the way to the development of palaeontology. Like that other great product of the enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, the Histoire Naturelle was a collaborative enterprise, outliving its instigator and chief author. The two scientists who were foremost among the several contributors were Daubenton and Lacépède (first as Comte de, then as Citoyen): they completed the work after Buffon’s death in 1788. We purchased the present copy from a collector who had acquired it at auction in 1973 (Priollaud & Lavoissière, La Rochelle, 18/19 October); the auction catalogue (included here) singles out the Buffon for mention on its front cover.
