Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1997

Après lui le délugeBuffonby Jacques Roger Cornell University Press: 1997. Pp. 492.$49.95, £39.50

Philippe Janvier

When about to be guillotined in 1794, “Buf-fonet”, the unfortunate son of the Frenchnaturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Count ofBuffon (1707–88), appealed to the people byshouting “Citizens, my name is Buffon!”, inthe hope that this would perhaps save him.He was aware that the considerable fameof his late father, who had died a year beforethe French Revolution, had survived theturmoils of the terror.

Buffonet failed, but Buffon still remainsdear to the heart of the French layman. Untilthe 1950s, French popular books on animalsfrequently referred to Buffon (The Children’sBuffon, The Family’s Buffon, and so on).

What made Buffon so different fromother ‘savants’ of the past two centuries? Hewas admittedly a pioneer of many new fields,tackling such issues as the antiquity of theEarth, the biological species concept and his-torical biogeography. But time has passed;we now live in the age of evolution, domi-nated by the glorious shadow of Darwin, andBuffon’s writings sound obsolete.

Jacques Roger (1920–90), a world-renowned historian of eighteenth-centuryscience, devoted most of his academic life toBuffon. His book, first published in French(Buffon, un Philosophe au Jardin du Roi,1989), is now translated into English —admirably so — and provides not only abiography of Buffon, but also a thoroughanalysis of his views in the framework of thephilosophical debates in the second half ofthe eighteenth century.

Roger points out previously unnoticedaspects of Buffon’s innovative insights, buthe also puts back in their right placeseveral overinterpreted sections of Buffon’s44-volume Histoire Naturelle Générale etParticulière.

The French are usually prone to defend-ing humble scientists who are victims ofoblivion or authority, such as Lamarck, buttheir sympathy for Buffon is at odds with thistradition. Buffon was not a victim, nor arejected genius, nor an introverted scientist.He loved life, food, women, wealth, powerand honours, and he was perfectly consciousof the success of his popular style. He wasalso a good businessman and a talentedmanager.

Nevertheless, he was moderate enough inboth his scientific statements and his politi-cal involvements to avoid having severeproblems with either the censor or the pro-gressive circles of his time. He seemed to copevery well with his society, although he fore-

saw the revolution (“I see a large movementcoming, and no one to lead it”).

What the layman liked above all in Buffonwas his skill for popularizing the natural sci-ences, largely using common sense as a basisfor deeper questions, covering all fields fromastronomy to anthropology, and all this in anexplanatory historical framework that didnot seem too shocking to religious minds.

The situation was quite different in aca-demic circles. During his lifetime, Buffonfaced strong criticism from some French andforeign scientists (in particular the followersof Linnaeus) who accused him of being asuperficial observer, a flabby experimenterand an “empty and bombastic” thinker. Dur-ing the revolution and empire, Buffon fadedinto the past as a typical character of theancien régime, although his fame remainedgreat among the public, as shown by thenumerous editions of his Histoire Naturelle.

With Darwin and the rise of modern evo-lutionary thought, and until recently, sometried to find in Buffon’s works cryptic allu-sions to descent with modification. The aimwas to show that Buffon was a pioneer of thisidea as well, rather than Lamarck who,unjustly, bore alone the burden of the theoryof the inheritance of acquired characters.The famous chapter on the ass, where Buf-fon precisely describes all the evolutionaryconsequences of the classifications and sud-denly rejects them as if in fear of the censor,is often cited as evidence for his transformistconvictions.

Roger, however, rejects this interpreta-tion. When Buffon feared the censor, such asin the case of the age of the Earth, he used toexpress his ideas in a cautious way, as a meretheory, but with numerous factual argu-ments in support of it. On the contrary, in thecase of the ‘transmutation’ of species, hisrejection was straightforward because hisstrict species concept, based on theimmutability of the “interior mould” andintersterility through time, could in no wayallow it.

Moreover, had he been a transformist, hecould have referred to Maupertuis who, in1751, had already proposed a theory of evo-lution based on successive, fortuitous muta-tions within species (to which Darwin lateradded natural selection). But Buffon re-jected this view with a number of argumentsthat would be repeated by antievolutioniststhroughout the nineteeth century.

Chapter 14 of Roger’s book will beextremely useful to historians of biology, as itclearly explains Buffon’s concepts of species,genus and family, which are different fromLinnaeus’s view and, in addition, changedwith time.

Nevertheless, Buffon’s ideas aboutspecies and systematics are strangely conver-gent with those of some modern systematistsand phylogeneticists. He considered thespecies as the only entity in nature that sur-

vives unchanged in time, and he regardedgroups of species (taxa) as mere speculationsbased on arbitrary sets of characters. Mod-ern systematists would add that these sets ofcharacters no longer need to be arbitrary ifdemonstrably inherited from a commonancestor and, in a sense, are more real thanspecies themselves, but they would agree thattaxa are not real.

This book is full of amusing anecdotes,such as the vivid reaction of Thomas Jeffer-son to Buffon’s statement that North Ameri-can animals were smaller than Europeanones because North America was cooler thanEurope at equal latitude (Buffon wasobsessed by the relationship between heatand life). This was unacceptable for Ameri-cans and later led Jefferson to try to find liv-ing mammoths in the West.

Roger’s book reads like a novel but alsoexplains the rise of Buffon’s ideas in the gen-eral context of the debates of his time. Itsnumerous notes, references and extensiveindex make it a major tool for historians ofscience. I would also recommend it to pro-fessional biologists and biology students,for whom serious biology often starts onlywith Darwin.

The book clearly shows that Buffonaddressed many questions that are still perti-nent to biology and that some sections of hisHistoire Naturelle are amazingly modern incomparison with later, nineteenth-centuryviews (in particular his observations on theuniqueness and biogeographical history ofthe human species).

The English translation by Sarah L.Bonnefoi is superb, as it preserves both theaccuracy of Roger’s style and the eleganceand subtlety of Buffon’s, which he himselfregarded as most important in conveyinghis ideas.Philippe Janvier is at the Laboratoire dePaléontologie, Muséum National d’HistoireNaturelle, 8 Rue Buffon, 75005, Paris, France.

NATURE | VOL 390 | 6 NOVEMBER 1997 37

autumn books

“Courly rouge du Brésil,” from Buffon’s HistoireNaturelle des Oiseaux.

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