French naturalist

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was an eighteenth century naturalist who advocated the idea that natural forces worked to shape Earth in a gradual and ongoing process. By rejecting the widely-held notion of his time that Earth was shaped by catastrophic divine acts, Buffon inspired later geologists and naturalists to investigate and define the process of natural evolution.

Buffon was born to an aristocratic family in Montbard, France. His affluent background allowed him to travel extensively and pursue a number of fields before he developed a passionate interest in natural history. After studying at the Jesuit College in Dijon, France, Buffon obtained a law degree in 1726. The intellectual life of Dijon was active but not oriented toward science, so Buffon went off to Angers, a city in northwestern France, to study medicine, mathematics, botany, and...