Buffon, Georges, Comte de (1707-1788)

French naturalist who became keeper of the French botanical gardens. At first, he believed in Leibniz's Law of Continuity and disagreed with Linnaeus's system of nomenclature, maintaining that a species was an artificial category. He changed his mind, however, when he found that the offspring of some plant hybridizations were sterile. He proposed identifying species through their reproductive histories, with two animals belonging to the same species if they can produce fertile offspring. His monumental life's work, Historie Naturelle (Natural History) (1749), ran to 36 volumes and tried to show the continuity of nature. Buffon had no concept of evolution, believing that species are fixed. Buffon was a believer in Vitalism, Eric Weisstein's World of Chemistry stating that living organisms possessed "matiére vive" (living matter). He also speculated on the origin of the Earth, Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy suggesting that it might have been created by the collision of a comet Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy with the Sun. Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy Based on the cooling rate of iron, he calculated that the age of the Earth Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was 75,000 years. This proclamation was condemned by the Catholic Church in France, who burned Buffon's books.

Buffon also proposed the Buffon's needle problem, Eric Weisstein's World of Math which asks the probability that a needle of length l will fall on a line when a piece of paper is ruled with parallel lines a distance d apart.