BUFFON, Georges-Louis LeclercBiblio.com
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1765ref. 6479Paris: Hôtel de Thou 1765. First Edition Primera edición. Hardcover Tapa dura. 247x186mm. 9¾x7¼". Paris Hôtel de Thou n.d. 1765. En 4º 247 x 186mm. 2 volúmenes. -I: 7 h. 182 láminas. -II: 1 h. 160 láminas. En total 362 láminas grabadas y coloreadas a mano en la época con la representación de animales. Encuadernación de la épocas en piel lomera cuajada de adornos dorados. Primera edición de una de las obras más raras y apreciadas de Buffon dedicada a los animales cuadrúpedos desconocida a Nissen y otra bibliografía especializada. Muy rara publicación separada de los grabados creados para los Animaux quadrupèdes de Buffon y organizados según el sistema linneano. Todas las 362 placas han sido delicadamente coloreadas a mano en el momento de la publicación. La publicación de la monumental Histoire Naturelle de Buffon iniciada en 1749 y continuada por Lacépède abarcó un lapso de más de 50 años. Su éxito fue inmediato y Buffon menciona en su correspondencia que los primeros 3 volúmenes se agotaron después de solo 6 semanas. Al año siguiente vio la luz una edición de menor formato. Sus ilustraciones se basaban en los mismos dibujos pero grabados sobre planchas en formato reducido. El pintor y excelente dibujante Jacques de Sève es el artista que ha realizado la práctica totalidad de las imágenes de esta Histoire naturelle. La mayoría de los dibujos originales están dispersos hoy; en 1791 se vendió una colección de 152 dibujos originales que habían pertenecido a la colección del conde Mirabeau. La calidad de las ilustraciones contribuyó enormemente al éxito universal y la popularidad de la obra prueba de lo cual esta suite publicada por separado. Los cuadrúpedos están aquí clasificados por orden y género en el sistema animal de Linné. Esta colección es de gran rareza y no se menciona en ninguna bibliografía especializada. Para Francia el Catalogue Collectif de France indica dos copias institucionales Bibliothèque nationale de France y Troyes; la base de datos KVK localiza una copia completa en Torino y un solo volumen en la Biblioteca Estatal de Rusia. Hôtel de Thou hardcover
ref. 55079Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale 1749-1786. FIRST EDITION. 34 vols. 4to. 25.25 x 19.5 cm. Uniformly bound in contemporary marbled calf spines richly gilt in compartments with fleur-de-lis motifs titles to two dark red morocco labels gilt raised bands royal arms of King Louis XV stamped in gilt to upper and lower covers his monogram gilt to each spine panel triple fillet to upper and lower covers gilt inner dentelles gilt original red ribbon page markers red speckled edges marbled endpapers. Complete with 980 full-page engraved plates of which 9 are folding including frontispiece of Buffon 4 folding maps and 1 folding chart. Numerous inter-textual tables engravings and cul-de-lampes throughout. In the Histoire Naturelle plate 14 is misbound in the third volume plates 5 and 6 are swapped in the fifth volume plates 13 and 14 are swapped in the tenth volume and two plates are numbered 46 in the twelfth volume one of which is entitled 46 bis. In the Supplément two plates are numbered 18 in the third volume one of which is entitled 18 bis and plate 41 is misbound in the sixth volume. Ex libris Robinet Fils with his armorial bookplate variably to front and back pastedowns sometimes removed and his old ownership stamp variably to front and back endpapers. A very handsome set. THE COMPLETE RUN OF VOLUMES PUBLISHED AT THE IMPRIMERIE ROYALE FOR WHICH BUFFON WAS EDITOR. This set which comprises 24 volumes of the Histoire Naturelle 6 volumes of the Supplément and 4 volumes of the Mineraux represents the complete run of volumes published at the Imprimerie Royale and for which Buffon acted as editor. Two additional volumes sometimes present are lacking here. They are the fifth and final volume of the Mineraux otherwise known as the Traité de l'aimant published at the Impremerie des Batiments du Roi rather than the Impremerie Royale in 1788 and the seventh and final volume of the Supplément published in 1789 after Buffon's death. After Buffon's death work was carried on by Bernard Germain de Lacépède who published 8 further volumes on egg-laying quadrupeds snakes fishes and cetaceans between 1788 and 1804. The last set to pass through our hands included these 10 additional volumes bound slightly differently - due to the publishing span - to the 34 original volumes such as those offered here. 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. The "most celebrated treatise on animals ever produced" Dinber 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. Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale, 1749-1786. hardcover
1804ref. 6665Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale later Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi; Hôtel de Thou; Plassan 1804. First edition. First edition a very fine uniformly-bound contemporary set with the separately-issued and frequently-absent atlas to the Minéraux of the first work to present natural history as a continuous secular narrative-from planetary formation through geology and mineralogy to the quadrupeds birds fishes and cetaceans and at last to the human races-and the work in which across fifty-five years and four political regimes the biblical chronology that had organised European natural science since antiquity ceased to be the only frame within which educated readers could discuss the age of the earth. In the Époques de la Nature 1778 Buffon proposed seven epochs of earth history and from cooling experiments in his own forge at Montbard estimated its age at roughly seventy-five thousand years; in unpublished notes his private estimate reaches three million-the order of magnitude Lyell would later extract from stratigraphy and Darwin require for natural selection to operate. . The Founding Treatise of Secular Science. First edition of the first work to present natural history as a continuous secular narrative from planetary formation to the human races and the work in which across fifty-five years and four political regimes the biblical chronology that had organised European natural science since antiquity ceased to be the only frame within which educated readers could discuss the age of the earth. Ernst Mayr called Buffon "the father of all thought in natural history" at his time; the DSB records that he "established the intellectual framework within which most naturalists up to Darwin worked." Buffon was appointed Intendant du Jardin du Roi in 1739 at thirty-two and spent nearly half a century converting the royal cabinet of natural-history specimens into a compendium. At its close under Lacépède's hand in 1804 it comprised forty-four quarto volumes more than twelve hundred engraved plates and a style so supple that Buffon's elegies on individual species remained set texts in French lycées into the twentieth century. Uniformly bound in contemporary French mottled calf and preserving all forty-four text volumes together with the separately-issued and frequently-absent atlas to the Minéraux the present copy is of a completeness and coherence uncommon in a publication whose fifty-five-year issue spanned four successive Parisian imprints. Within thirty years of the final volume Lyell was writing the Principles of Geology; within sixty Darwin the Origin. The publishing history ran for fifty-five years through four imprints. The first three volumes appeared together in the autumn of 1749 from the Imprimerie Royale sold out in six weeks were reprinted three times within the same interval and provoked the Sorbonne's faculty of theology into delivering Buffon a list of propositions judged heretical-to which Buffon submitted a carefully calibrated retraction while continuing to print the offending volumes unchanged. The initial prospectus of 1748 had promised fifteen volumes in three divisions; by the time Buffon died in 1788 thirty-five were in print a thirty-sixth was on the press and the plan of covering the vegetable kingdom had quietly been abandoned. The seventh and final Supplément appeared posthumously in 1789 through Lacépède's editorship; the fifth volume of the Minéraux containing the Traité de l'aimant had issued a year earlier from the Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi and was accompanied by a separately-issued atlas of folding maps and tables. Lacépède then continued the animal-kingdom programme with the Quadrupèdes ovipares et Serpens 1788-89 the Poissons 1798-An XII and the Cétacées 1804. The combined output of four imprints across three generations of Parisian printers-the Imprimerie Royale the Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi the Hôtel de Thou under Panckoucke and Plassan and Plassan imprimeur-libraire-is the reason a uniformly-bound contemporary set is uncommon. Volume I opens the series with the Premier Discours: De la manière d'étudier et de traiter l'histoire naturelle a forty-page polemic against Linnaean classification that argues from a position of mathematical and empirical rigour rare in the literature of the period that species as Linnaeus conceived them were artificial abstractions imposed on the continuous variability of individuals and that a taxonomy built on stamen-counts and pistil-counts did not correspond to nature. The attack was political as well as philosophical. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae Leiden 1735 had already been adopted as the common grammar of European zoology; Buffon's Discours delivered from within the most prestigious press in France asserted that the Swede's method was a convenience of memory mistaken for a description of the world. The volume continues with the Second Discours: Histoire et théorie de la Terre dated by Buffon himself "à Montbard le 3 octobre 1744" which proposes a cosmogony in which the planets were struck from the sun by the oblique impact of a comet and have been cooling ever since and with the Preuves de la théorie de la Terre in which Buffon develops his theory across seventeen articles and provides two engraved terrestrial maps drawn under his supervision by Robert de Vaugondy fils. These arguments delivered within a volume bearing the royal arms of France on its title-page vignette constituted a public challenge to Mosaic cosmogony. The geological argument reached its mature form a generation later in the fifth Supplément the Époques de la Nature 1778 published when Buffon was seventy-one. Here he proposed seven epochs of the earth's history estimated their combined duration at roughly 75000 years and in unpublished manuscript notes pushed his private estimate to three million-an order of magnitude consistent with the timescales that Lyell would later extract from stratigraphy and that Darwin would require for natural selection to operate. Beyond the number the Époques argues by accumulation: Buffon marshals fossil molluscs at Alpine altitudes the decay of volcanic emissions the rate at which heated iron spheres cool in Buffon's own forge at Montbard and the distribution of living species across climate zones and weaves these into a cumulative inductive case in which each line of evidence corroborates the others. The technique is no longer antiquarian but probabilistic; Buffon had published a French translation of Newton's Method of Fluxions in 1740 and would publish original work on geometric probability. When the Époques reached Edinburgh and Cambridge in the 1780s it announced to Anglophone readers that the earth's antiquity had become a quantitative problem rather than a scriptural one. The core of the programme is the animal kingdom. Volumes 4 through 15 1753-1767 treat the quadrupeds in an arrangement that combines Buffon's natural-historical essays with Daubenton's anatomical descriptions-a division of labour Buffon defended in the Preface to volume IV and that Daubenton eventually came to resent his name disappearing from the later volumes. The Oiseaux volumes 1770-1783 are the work of Buffon with Philibert Guéneau de Montbeillard and the Abbé Bexon and assume decisively that geographic distribution is a datum of zoology rather than an incidental fact about individual animals-a premise that commits the Histoire naturelle to the biogeographic thinking which Alfred Russel Wallace would systematise a century later. The Minéraux volumes I-V 1783-1788 extend the account to the inorganic world and conclude with the Traité de l'aimant Buffon's last publication in his lifetime accompanied by the atlas that the present set preserves. Lacépède's eight continuation volumes close the series with the Ovipares et Serpens the Poissons five volumes 1798-An XII drawing on the manuscript collections of Philibert Commerson and the Cétacées 1804-the whole project begun under Louis XV and finished under the Consulate of Bonaparte. The plate programme numbering 1275 copper engravings including the portrait frontispiece of Buffon and twelve folding maps was entrusted principally to Jacques de Sève and his son Jacques-Eustache de Sève with additional designs by Buvée l'Amériquain Oudry and Baron and engravings by Baquoy Basan Moitte and Tardieu. De Sève père is the designing sensibility that defines the visual character of the Histoire naturelle: his quadrupeds stand in pastoral European landscapes-villages rivers mountains ruins-that place each species within a habitat rather than isolating it on the diagrammatic ground of the pre-Linnaean iconotheca. The aesthetic choice is not decorative. It performs Buffon's thesis that species are functions of geography; the elk against a Norwegian spruce-line and the jerboa against a North African dune argue in visual shorthand a zoogeography that the text elaborates. The plates in the present set are in the original uncoloured state as issued by the Imprimerie Royale and its successor presses; the hand-coloured Planches enluminées of Edme-Louis Daubenton 1765-1786 1008 plates issued separately to accompany the de luxe folio edition of the Oiseaux are a distinct publication and do not belong to the quarto edition. Buffon was born Georges-Louis Leclerc at Montbard in Burgundy on 7 September 1707 the son of a magistrate of the Estates of Burgundy who in 1714 inherited a substantial fortune from a maternal relative and acquired the lordship of Buffon - the toponym from which the future comte took the name by which he is universally known. He was educated by the Jesuits at Dijon studied mathematics at Angers and travelled in Italy and England in 1730-1733 in the company of the young Duke of Kingston and his Genevan tutor Nathaniel Hickman. Election to the Académie des Sciences followed at twenty-six in 1734. His earliest publications were French translations of Newton's Method of Fluxions 1740 and Stephen Hales's Vegetable Staticks 1735 and an original 1733 communication to the Académie on the geometric probability of a needle dropped at random across a ruled floor - the "needle problem" that bears his name in the founding literature of integral geometry. The 1739 appointment as Intendant du Jardin du Roi secured through the patronage of Maurepas gave him the cabinet the printing privilege and the institutional platform that the Histoire naturelle required. From 1739 onward his year was strictly bisected: October to April in Paris among the specimens May to September at Montbard where the great house the gardens the ducal tower and from 1768 an industrial-scale ironworks furnished both the writing room and the experimental laboratory. The Montbard forge is the experimental backbone of Buffon's late geological writing. From 1765 onward he conducted a sustained programme of cooling experiments in which iron and stone spheres of graduated diameter were heated to incandescence and the time required for them to cool to ambient temperature was measured under controlled conditions. Extrapolating from sphere to planet on the assumption that the earth had begun as a molten body progressively congealed Buffon arrived at the published 75000-year estimate of the Époques de la Nature and at the manuscript figure three million years that he allowed his students to read but did not put into print. The forge was simultaneously a working blast-furnace producing pig-iron for the Burgundian armaments trade - the revenue from which subsidised the publication and freed Buffon from dependence on royal subvention. The orangery at Montbard housed parallel experiments on plant respiration and the germination of seeds; the great walled garden was a controlled environment for testing the hardiness of imported species against Burgundian winters. The whole estate in effect was an early instance of the gentleman-natural-philosopher's establishment as instrument - comparable in scale to Tycho's Uraniborg to Boyle's Stalbridge or to Darwin's later Down House. The Histoire naturelle is the published face of this experimental enterprise. The literary reception of Buffon was nearly as consequential as the scientific. His 1753 reception address to the Académie française the Discours sur le style "le style est l'homme même" became one of the most quoted statements of French neoclassical aesthetics and reframed the Histoire naturelle as a literary as well as a scientific monument. The set-piece elegies on the horse the lion the swan the orangutan and the dog were detached from the parent volumes and circulated as morceaux choisis; they remained obligatory recitation pieces in the French lycée through the Third Republic and were anthologised by Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi in 1855 as the model of mid-eighteenth-century French prose. Diderot read and annotated the early volumes for the Encyclopédie; Rousseau with whom Buffon's relations were polite but distant took the geographic-determinist passages as silent corroboration of his own anthropology; Voltaire who shared Buffon's anti-Sorbonne instinct but resented his court success kept up a guarded correspondence. The Smellie translation Edinburgh 1780-1785 and Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature London 1774 an avowed abridgment carried the work into the English-speaking world where Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia 1794-96 silently absorbed Buffon's transformist hints into its own evolutionary speculation. The afterlife of Buffon's argument runs straight through nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. Cuvier lecturing at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle from 1795 treated the Histoire naturelle as the institutional charter of his own comparative-anatomical programme even while disputing its transformism. Lamarck who had reorganised the botanical galleries under Buffon in 1788 developed his 1809 Philosophie zoologique by extending Buffon's observations of climate-driven variability into a fully transformist mechanism. Lyell's Principles of Geology 1830-33 acknowledged in its preface that the eighteenth-century revolution in geological time had been Buffon's and Darwin in the historical sketch added to the third edition of the Origin 1861 placed Buffon at the head of the line of pre-evolutionary speculators - with the politically careful note that the Histoire naturelle had at one point been condemned by the Sorbonne. Thomas Jefferson who owned the work at Monticello Sowerby 1024 for volumes 1-31 and 637 for the Suppléments and corresponded with Buffon about American zoology was so stung by Buffon's thesis that New World fauna were degenerate forms of Old World types that he had the bones of an American moose shipped across the Atlantic to Paris as evidence in rebuttal. The German reception travelled along a separate but parallel channel: Goethe read the Époques in 1781 and absorbed its rhetoric of geological depth into his own morphological writing and Alexander von Humboldt whose Kosmos 1845-1862 is the nineteenth-century lineal descendant of the encyclopaedic ambition of the Histoire naturelle repeatedly cited Buffon as the founder of the genre to which he conceived his own work as belonging. The scholarly modern editions - the Imprimerie Nationale Pléiade selection of 1954 under the editorship of Jean Piveteau the 1971 Bibliothek Suhrkamp German selection edited by Jacques Roger and Roger's own 1989 Fayard biography translated as Buffon: A Life in Natural History Cornell 1997 - are all built on direct consultation of the original quarto edition of which complete uniformly-bound contemporary sets remain the necessary collation copy. The Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle's Buffon: Histoire naturelle générale et particulière bibliography Pierre Lecouturier and Roger Hahn 1972 supplemented by Jeff Loveland and others through the 2010s confirms that no two contemporary sets are identical in title-page state advertisement leaves or the order of the prefatory matter and treats the uniformly-bound quarto with a complete Minéraux atlas as the bibliographical reference state for the work. References: Printing and the Mind of Man 198 Carter and Muir identify Buffon's priority in presenting the natural world as a single unified field - Dibner Heralds of Science 193 described as the most celebrated treatise on animals ever produced - Norman 369-370 - Evans First Editions of Scientific Books Berkeley exhibition 1934 no. 97 - Nissen ZBI 672 - Wellcome II 267 - Brunet I 1376 Brunet recommends that collectors always seek out this first quarto edition for the beauty of its engravings - Sowerby Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson 1024 and 637. 45 volumes 4to 242 × 188 mm comprising the 44 text volumes and the separately-issued atlas to the Minéraux. 1275 engraved plates including the portrait frontispiece of Buffon and twelve folding maps mostly by Jacques de Sève père and his son Jacques-Eustache de Sève with further designs by Buvée l'Amériquain Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Nicolas Baron engraved by Baquoy Basan Moitte and Tardieu. Uniform contemporary French mottled calf the spines gilt in compartments with small lozenge tools and two black morocco lettering-pieces triple gilt fillet on the covers marbled edges and matching Spanish-shell marbled endpapers; narrow blue silk ribbon markers at the heads of the spines. A very fine set. The Oiseaux volumes are numbered I-IX on their title-pages and continuously as tomes XVI-XXIV on their half-titles. . De l'Imprimerie Royale [later Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi; Hôtel de Thou; Plassan] unknown
1771ref. 122Buffon's Histoire Naturelle " One of the most important of all birds books from the collector's point of view " Stillwell 63. A magnificent copy complete with its 1 008 beautiful plates in contemporary coloring preserved in its contemporary binding. Contemporary painted calf gilt fillets on covers ribbed spine decorated with gilt fillets and gilt fleurons red yellow and green morocco lettering piece double gilt filet on leading edges inner gilt dentelle gilt edges. The most beautiful and most famous Buffon illustrated books. A very rare and magnificent copy printed on large paper and complete with its 1 008 handcouloured plates. Cohen 194 ; Nissen IV B 158 ; Brunet I 1379-1380 ; Ronsil 76. The 1 008 plates drawn by François-Nicolas Martinet 1731-1800 under Edmée-Louis Daubenton's supervision are dedicated to birds butterflies flying insects and to a few reptiles and mammals. All the plates were drawn and handcoloured at the time. Buffon decided to dedicate this separate beautiful edition to birds and ha dit printed in 4° and folio format. " One of the most important of all birds books from the collector's point of view " Stillwell 63. "In 1739 Buffon was appointed Director of the Jardin du Roi. It would appear that the "Natural History" germinated in the preparation of a catalogue of the royal collection. Buffon then enlarged its scope to Aristotelian or Plinian proportions and finally transformed it into a conspectus of nature of a breadth and depth previously unknown. The Natural History was a great popular success" PMM. A lot of copies are missing the insects supplement of 35 plates and only contain 973 plates. A magnificent copy belonging to the luxuous folio edition complete with its 1008 plates handcouloured at the time preserved in its contemporary binding. Copies' value depend on its number of plates and on its bindings. (Imprimerie Royale) hardcover
1766ref. ABC_47564Dordrecht: Abraham Blussé 1766. Contemporary uniform half tanned sheepskin sewn on 5 supports gold-tooled spines each volume with author subject and part number on 2 green spine labels in the 2nd and 3rd of 6 compartments paste-paper sides. Large 4to. With more than 1100 hand-coloured engraved plates 10 maps 1 folding engraved table and an engraved portrait of Buffon by Houbraken with an extra-added plain portrait pasted on the verso. 38 parts in 21 volumes. Including:Volume 1: tome 1: Théorie de la Terre 2 plates tome 2: Histoire générale des animaux 8 plates tome 3: Histoire naturelle de l'homme 18 plates. Volume 2: tomes 4 & 5: Les Quadrupèdes 23 and 60 plates and an engraved table of dogs. Volume 3: tomes 6 & 7: Les Quadrupèdes 49 and 48 plates Volume 4: tomes 8 & 9: Les Quadrupèdes 54 and 41 plates.Volume 5: tomes 10 & 11: Les Quadrupèdes 57 and 45 plates.Volume 6: tomes 12 & 13: Les Quadrupèdes 60 and 62 plates.Volume 7: tomes 14 & 15: Les Quadrupèdes 60 and 16 plates.Volume 8: Supplément tomes I - II 17 plates.Volume 9: Supplément à l'histoire de l'homme et aux animaux quadrupèdes - tomes III-IV 6 and 67 plates.Volume 10: Supplément les époques de la natures - tomes V-VI 46 and 6 plates 10 maps.Volume 11: Supplément tome VII 74 plates Volume 12: Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux nouvelle édition tome 1: 29 platesVolume 13: Oiseaux: tomes 2 & 3: 27 & 31 platesVolume 14: Oiseaux: tomes 4 & 5: 28 & 22 platesVolume 15: Oiseaux: tomes 6 & 7: 25 & 31 platesVolume 16: Oiseaux: tomes 8 & 9: 39 & 31 plates. Volume 17: Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux nouvelle édition tomes 1 & 2; Volume 18: Minéraux: tomes 3 & 4; Volume 19: Minéraux: tome 5 traité de l'aimant et de ses usages.Volume 20: Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des serpens nouvelle édition tome 1: 41 platesVolume 21: Quadrupèdes ovipares et des serpens: tome 2: 22 plates Finely hand-coloured copy of the 1766-1799 Netherlands edition in French of Buffon's justly famous Histoire naturelle the complete first series covering the formation of the earth humans mammalian quadrupeds and apes reptiles and amphibians birds fishes and even minerals also describing the royal collection of Louis XV. Buffon's work presents ''for the first time a complete survey of natural history in popular form'' PMM. The present set in the works rarest and most expensive form is exquisite. The subscription notices periodically mention copies printed on fine paper but they do not mention hand-coloured copies. Landwehr discussing the first Dutch-language edition no. 46 by the same publisher cites contemporary sources referring to four forms of publication: on regular paper on large paper with hand-coloured plates and most expensive of all with hand-coloured plates and vignettes.Buffon opens the first volume with an essay called "Théorie de la terre" where "for the first time he outlines a satisfactory account of the history of our globe and of its development as a fitting home for living things. In his view the earth had been originally part of the sun which was broken off by the impact of a comet. It gradually condensed from its gaseous state and the forces shaping its continents and mountains are still active'' PMM. From his exhaustive research for the Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes Buffon came to the conclusion that it was necessary to reintroduce the notion of family. Breaking with the spirit of his time Buffon attempted to separate science from metaphysical and religious ideas. As a disciple of Locke he denied idealistic metaphysics stating that mental abstractions can never become principles of either existence or real knowledge; these can come only as the results of sensation'' DSB.Buffon did not believe in the fixity of species but proposed that nature is constantly changing. For instance in the case of quadrupeds he stated that there were 38 basic types that degenerated over the centuries. According to Buffon the monkey is a degenerated man the ass a degenerated horse. His interest in the precise connection between groups of animals that are obviously related prompted Buffon to devote much attention to comparative anatomy in the Histoire naturelle. He also stressed the importance of the study of earth sciences for botany and zoology. "Life and animation instead of being a metaphysical point in being is a physical property of matter" DSB. Buffon's views on the origin and development of species and the history of the earth show how he tried to describe natural phenomena by means of science discarding metaphysical and religious explanations. "He was the first to create an autonomous science free of any theological influence . and established the intellectual framework within which most naturalists up to Darwin worked" DSB.Buffon was assisted by the anatomist Louis Daubenton and others and the final volumes were completed after his death under the direction of Comte de Lacépède.With the owners name Sir George. Murray 1772-1846 on the half-title of most volumes. He was a Scottish soldier from a noble family who served in Flanders the West Indies Egypt and elsewhere eventually becoming quarter master general of Wellingtons staff in Spain and Portugal and reaching the rank of General. He was Knighted in 1813 held governorships of several colonies and the military college at Sandhurst along with leading posts at the Colonial Office where he helped establish the colony of Western Australia and served from 1823 as a member of the British parliament. With the bookplate of the German entrepreneur and bibliophile Hans Dedi 1918-2016. Lacking a few half-titles for example in the bird volumes 1 and 2 but otherwise in very good condition most of the plates fine with occasional stains and spots a few tears and repairs the binding also with some minor wear and repairs. A splendid copy of a seminal monument of natural history.l Landwehr Coloured plates 45 and 46 Dutch ed.; Nissen ZBI 678. Abraham Blussé, unknown
