Buffon's works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier.

[2] Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was later forced by the theology committee at the University of Paris to recant his theories about geological history and animal evolution because they contradicted the biblical narrative of Creation.

At Angers in 1730 he made the acquaintance of the young English Duke of Kingston, who was on his grand tour of Europe, and traveled with him on a large and expensive entourage for a year and a half through southern France and parts of Italy.

He lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with Gilles-François Boulduc, first apothecary of the King, professor of chemistry at the Royal Garden of Plants, member of the Academy of Sciences.

Thanks to his talent as a writer, he was invited to join Paris's second great academy, the Académie Française in 1753 and then in 1768 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

[9] Unfortunately for him, Buffon's reputation as a literary stylist also gave ammunition to his detractors: the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert, for example, called him "the great phrase-monger".

In 1752 Buffon married Marie-Françoise de Saint-Belin-Malain, the daughter of an impoverished noble family from Burgundy, who had been enrolled in the convent school run by his sister.

He was buried in a chapel adjacent to the church of Sainte-Urse Montbard; during the French Revolution, his tomb was broken into and the lead that covered the coffin was ransacked to produce bullets.

Today, only Buffon's cerebellum remains, as it is kept in the base of the statue by Pajou that Louis XVI had commissioned in his honor in 1776, located at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

His Histoire naturelle was also a source of inspiration for the painters of the Sèvres factory, giving rise to porcelain services called Buffon.

[2] Those who assisted him in the production of this great work included Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Philibert Guéneau de Montbeillard, and Gabriel-Léopold Bexon, along with numerous artists.

Buffon's Histoire naturelle was translated into many different languages, making him one of the most widely read authors of the day, a rival to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

[15] Jefferson dispatched twenty soldiers to the New Hampshire woods to find a bull moose for Buffon as proof of the "stature and majesty of American quadrupeds".

"[17] In Les époques de la nature (1778) Buffon discussed the origins of the Solar System, speculating that the planets had been created by a comet's collision with the Sun.

Basing his figures on the cooling rate of iron tested at his Laboratory the Petit Fontenet at Montbard, he calculated that the Earth was at least 75,000 years old.

Buffon believed in monogenism, the concept that all humanity has a single origin, and that physical differences arose from adaptation to environmental factors, including climate and diet.

Instead he stated that Japanese and Chinese culture were “of a very ancient date,” and that Europe “only much later received the light from the East…it is thus in the northern countries of Asia that the stem of human knowledge grew.

[23] Clarence Glacken suggests that "The environmental changes through human agency described by Buffon were those which were familiar and traditional in the history of Western civilization".

In this sense, Buffon expands his perspective on monogenism that associating these dissimilar traits and features into one larger category rather than in a fixed division.

Charles Darwin wrote in his preliminary historical sketch added to the third edition of On the Origin of Species: "Passing over ... Buffon, with whose writings I am not familiar".

Then, from the fourth edition onwards, he amended this to say that "the first author who in modern times has treated it [evolution] in a scientific spirit was Buffon.