Georges-Louis Leclerc, Histoire naturelle, 37 vols (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1750-1789)

Gamma.scam.13

A first step on the long road to the theory of evolution?

The French mathematician-turned-naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-1788), Comte de Buffon, is no longer a household name. In his time, however, he was ‘the most widely read scientific author of the day, equalling Rousseau or Voltaire’ (Browne, p. 2). Criticising the influential taxonomy of his Swedish contemporary Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Leclerc was the first to ‘put forward the breeding criteria on which modern definitions [of species] depend’ (Browne, p. 1). Instead of being a ‘static entity’, a species was ‘a succession of genetically related beings that differentiated in time’ (Farber, p. 284). This new understanding is closely related to the continuing separation of the sciences from religion during the early modern era. Leclerc argued that animals and plants ‘changed over time according to the environment’ (Browne, p.1). A species was thus a ‘historical entity’, as ‘the environment was the cause of its changing expression [and] the concept of species was inextricably associated with the history of the earth’ (Farber, p. 284). There is much disagreement among scholars as to whether or not (and if so, to what extent) Leclerc’s thoughts may have preceded the 19th-century theory of evolution.

Over-ambitiously, Leclerc planned his Histoire naturelle as a description of the ‘whole of the natural world from the origin of the Earth’ to his own time (Browne, p. 1). Ultimately, however, the original 36 volumes plus one volume of notes focus largely on animals. The texts are accompanied by a vast number of illustrations, in total 1,061 plates in the first 36 volumes (Hoquet, p. 13). Each animal is illustrated at least once and sometimes there are anatomical follow-up illustrations in which the skeleton appears in the same pose as the animal in the initial illustration. For the engravings of the volumes presenting the mammals, which includes volume 13 exhibited here, Leclerc commissioned the French illustrator Jacques de Sève (1715-1795).