The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (French: [istwaʁ natyʁɛl]; English: Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King's Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804, initially by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède.

It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.

Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds.

Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.

[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a "purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value".

A few months before Buffon's death, in 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy.

[16] W. Davidson published an abridged version including the natural history of insects taken from Swammerdam, Brookes, Goldsmith et al., with "elegant engravings on wood"; its four volumes appeared in Alnwick in 1814.

[17] German translations include those published by Joseph Georg Trassler 1784–1785; by Pauli, 1772–1829; Grund and Holle, 1750–1775; and Johann Samuel Heinsius, 1756–1782.

A Russian version (The General and Particular Natural History by Count Buffon; "Всеобщая и частная естественная история графа Бюффона") was brought out by The Imperial Academy of Sciences (Императорской Академией Наук) in St. Petersburg between 1789 and 1808.

[5] But Buffon was criticised by some priests for suggesting (in the essay Les Epoques de Nature, Volume XXXIV)[5] that the Earth was more than 6,000 years old and that mountains had arisen in geological time.

Buffon cites as evidence that fossil sea-shells had been found at the tops of mountains;[18] but the claim was seen as contradicting the biblical account in the Book of Genesis.

In Buffon's view, expounded in the "Premier Discours" of the Histoire Naturelle (1749), the concept of species was entirely artificial, the only real entity in nature being the individual; as for a taxonomy based on the number of stamens or pistils in a flower, mere counting (despite Buffon's own training in mathematics) had no bearing on nature.

[19] The Paris faculty of theology, acting as the official censor, wrote to Buffon with a list of statements in the Histoire Naturelle that were contradictory to Roman Catholic Church teaching.

Buffon replied that he believed firmly in the biblical account of creation, and was able to continue printing his book, and remain in position as the leader of the 'old school', complete with his job as director of the royal botanical garden.

[20] Buffon's position on evolution is complex; he noted in Volume 4 from Daubenton's comparative anatomy of the horse and the donkey that species might "transform", but initially (1753) rejected the possibility.

[20] The botanist Sandra Knapp writes that "Buffon's prose was so purple that the ideas themselves are almost hidden",[5] observing that this was also the contemporary academic opinion.

"[5] She concludes "No wonder the cultured aristocratic public lapped it up – the text reads more like a romantic novel than a dry scientific treatise".

[5] The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr comments that "In this monumental and fascinating Histoire naturelle, Buffon dealt in a stimulating manner with almost all the problems that would subsequently be raised by evolutionists.

[21] Mayr argued that "virtually all the well-known writers of the Enlightenment"[21] were "Buffonians", and calls Buffon "the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century".

[21] Mayr notes that Buffon was not an "evolutionist", but was certainly responsible for creating the great amount of interest in natural history in France.

[21] He agrees that Buffon's thought is hard to classify and even self-contradictory, and that the theologians forced him to avoid writing some of his opinions openly.