GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON

(1707-1788)

BY SPENCER TROTTER

A science becomes part of the general stock of knowledge only after it has entered into the literature of a people.  The bare skeleton of facts must be clothed with the flesh and blood of imagination, through the humanizing influence of literary expression, before it can be assimilated by the average intellectual being.  The scientific investigator is rarely endowed with the gift of weaving the facts into a story that will charm, and the man of letters is too often devoid of that patience which is the chief virtue of the scientist.  These gifts of the gods are bestowed upon mankind under the guiding genius of the division of labor.  The name of Buffon will always be associated with natural history, though in the man himself the spirit of science was conspicuously absent.  In this respect he was in marked contrast with his contemporary Linnaeus, whose intellect and labor laid the foundations of much of the scientific knowledge of to-day.

[ILLUSTRATION:  BUFFON]

George Louis le Clerc Buffon was born on the 7th of September, 1707, at Montbar, in Burgundy.  His father, Benjamin le Clerc, who was possessed of a fortune, appears to have bestowed great care and liberality on the education of his son.  While a youth Buffon made the acquaintance of a young English nobleman, the Duke of Kingston, whose tutor, a man well versed in the knowledge of physical science, exerted a profound influence on the future career of the young Frenchman.  At twenty-one Buffon came into his mother’s estate, a fortune yielding an annual income of L12,000.  But this wealth did not change his purpose to gain knowledge.  He traveled through Italy, and after living for a short period in England returned to France and devoted his time to literary work.  His first efforts were translations of two English works of science—­Hale’s ‘Vegetable Statics’ and Newton’s ‘Fluxions’; and he followed these with various studies in the different branches of physical science.

The determining event in his life, which led him to devote the rest of his years to the study of natural history, was the death of his friend Du Fay, the Intendant of the Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes), who on his death-bed recommended Buffon as his successor.  A man of letters, Buffon saw before him the opportunity to write a natural history of the earth and its inhabitants; and he set to work with a zeal that lasted until his death in 1788, at the age of eighty-one.  His great work, ‘L’Histoire Naturelle,’ was the outcome of these years of labor, the first edition being complete in thirty-six quarto volumes.