BUFFON, GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE (b. Montbard, France, 7 September 1707; d. Paris, France, 16 April 1788); natural history.

Buffon was the son of Benjamin-François Leclerc and Anne-Cristine Marlin, both of whom came from the bourgeoisie. Anne Marlin was related to a rich financier whose money enabled Benjamin to become, in 1717, lord of Buffon and of Montbard, and conseiller to the Burgundian parliament. Georges-Louis, the naturalist, was the eldest of five children, of whom three others entered the church, where two of them rose to high position. In 1717 the Leclerc family moved to a fine house in Dijon, where they occupied an important place in society. The intellectual life of that provincial capital was active but not oriented toward science at that particular time.

Georges-Louis was a pupil at the Collège des Jésuites in Dijon from 1717 to 1723. He was only an average student, although he distinguished himself by his bent for mathematics. His father undoubtedly wanted him to have a legal career, and he did study law in Dijon between 1723 and 1726. As early as 1727, however, he became friendly with the young Swiss mathematician Gabriel Cramer, a professor at the University of Geneva. In 1728 he went to Angers, where he may have studied medicine and botany, as well as mathematics, with Père de Landreville, professor at the Collège de l'Oratoire. A duel forced him to leave Angers in October 1730, and he embarked on a long journey through Southern France and Italy with a young English nobleman, the duke of Kingston, and his tutor, Nathaniel Hickman, an obscure member of the Royal Society.

Buffon returned to France in 1732 and, despite his father's opposition, obtained his mother's fortune (she had died during his absence). At the same time, he began to make himself known in Parisian political and scientific circles. His first works on the tensile strength of timber were written at the request of the minister of the navy, Maurepas, who was seeking to improve the construction of war vessels. Buffon's Mémoire sur le jeu du franc-carreau, a study of probability theory, contributed to his admission to the Académie Royale des Sciences as adjoint-méchanicien on 9 January 1734. For six years he divided his time among finance (his fortune soon became considerable); research in botany and forestry (he wrote several dissertations and translated Stephen Hales's Vegetable Statiks into French in 1734); and mathematics (he wrote dissertations and in 1740 translated Newton's The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series into French from the English translation of the original Latin manuscript, published in 1736 by John Colson). At the end of this time he also became interested in chemistry and biology and conducted some microscopic research on animal reproduction. In June 1739 he became an académicien-associé and transferred from the mechanical to the botanical section. That July, through the influence of Maurepas, he succeeded Dufay as intendant of the Jardin du Roi.

Each spring, from 1740 on, Buffon left Paris for Montbard, to administer his estates, continue his research, and edit his writings. His robust constitution allowed him to adhere to a well-organized schedule: he arose at dawn and spent the morning at his work, and the afternoon at his business affairs. For fifty years, Buffon spent the summer on his estate, returning to Paris in the fall. At the end of this time, he had doubled the area of the Jardin du Roi, enriched its collections, and enlarged its buildings considerably; moreover, he himself had become rich, having been showered with pensions and having increased his landholdings. He had published the thirty-six volumes of Histoire naturelle and was famous throughout Europe and even in America; he was a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, the Académie Française, the Royal Society of London, and the academies of Berlin and St. Petersburg, among others. Catherine II bestowed gifts upon him, and Louis XV made him Comte de Buffon and commissioned