Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy.
Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale [later Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi; Hôtel de Thou; Plassan], 1749–An XII [1804]. First edition of the first work to present natural history as a continuous secular narrative—from planetary formation through geology and mineralogy to the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and cetaceans, and at last to the human races—and the work in which, across fifty-five years and four political regimes, the biblical chronology that had organised European natural science since antiquity ceased to be the only frame within which educated readers could discuss the age of the earth. Buffon was appointed Intendant du Jardin du Roi in 1739 at thirty-two, and spent nearly half a century converting the royal cabinet of natural-history specimens into a compendium that, at its close under Lacépède's hand in 1804, comprised forty-four quarto volumes, more than twelve hundred engraved plates, and a style so supple that Buffon's elegies on individual species remained set texts in French lycées into the twentieth century. Uniformly bound in contemporary French mottled calf and preserving all forty-four text volumes together with the separately-issued and frequently-absent atlas to the Minéraux, the present copy is of a completeness and coherence uncommon in a publication whose fifty-five-year issue spanned four successive Parisian imprints. His prose made deep time habitable. Within thirty years of the final volume Lyell was writing the Principles of Geology; within sixty, Darwin the Origin. Ernst Mayr called Buffon “the father of all thought in natural history” at his time; the DSB records that he “established the intellectual framework within which most naturalists up to Darwin worked.” The publishing history is itself a monument. The first three volumes appeared together in the autumn of 1749 from the Imprimerie Royale, sold out in six weeks, were reprinted three times within the same interval, and provoked the Sorbonne's faculty of theology into delivering Buffon a list of propositions judged heretical—to which Buffon submitted a carefully calibrated retraction while continuing to print the offending volumes unchanged. The initial prospectus of 1748 had promised fifteen volumes in three divisions; by the time Buffon died in 1788 thirty-five were in print, a thirty-sixth was on the press, and the plan of covering the vegetable kingdom had quietly been abandoned. The seventh and final Supplément appeared posthumously in 1789 through Lacépède's editorship; the fifth volume of the Minéraux, containing the Traité de l'aimant, had issued a year earlier from the Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi and was accompanied by a separately-issued atlas of folding maps and tables. Lacépède then continued the animal-kingdom programme with the Quadrupèdes ovipares et Serpens (1788–89), the Poissons (1798–An XII) and the Cétacées (1804). The combined output of four imprints across three generations of Parisian printers—the Imprimerie Royale, the Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi, the Hôtel de Thou under Panckoucke and Plassan, and Plassan imprimeur-libraire—makes the uniformly-bound contemporary set one of the more elusive bibliographical objects of the French Enlightenment. Volume I opens the series with the Premier Discours: De la manière d'étudier et de traiter l'histoire naturelle, a forty-page frontal assault on Linnaean classification that argues, from a position of mathematical and empirical rigour rare in the literature of the period, that species as Linnaeus conceived them were artificial abstractions imposed on the continuous variability of individuals, and that a taxonomy built on stamen-counts and pistil-counts had no purchase on nature. The attack was political as well as philosophical. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (Leiden, 1735) had already been adopted as the common grammar of European zoology; Buffon's Discours, delivered from within the most prestigious press in France, asserted that the Swede's method was a convenience of memory mistaken for a description of the world. The volume continues with the Second Discours: Histoire et théorie de la Terre, dated by Buffon himself “à Montbard le 3 octobre 1744,” which proposes a cosmogony in which the planets were struck from the sun by the oblique impact of a comet and have been cooling ever since, and with the Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, in which Buffon develops his theory across seventeen articles and provides two engraved terrestrial maps drawn under his supervision by Robert de Vaugondy fils. These arguments, delivered within a volume bearing the royal arms of France on its title-page vignette, constituted the most public challenge to Mosaic cosmogony yet mounted in eighteenth-century France. The geological argument reached its mature form a generation later in the fifth Supplément, the Époques de la Nature (1778), published when Buffon was seventy-one. Here he proposed seven epochs of the earth's history, estimated their combined duration at roughly 75,000 years, and in unpublished manuscript notes pushed his private estimate to three million—an order of magnitude consistent with the timescales that Lyell would later extract from stratigraphy and that Darwin would require for natural selection to operate. The significance of the Époques is not only the number. It is the rhetorical form of the argument: Buffon marshals fossil molluscs at Alpine altitudes, the decay of volcanic emissions, the rate at which heated iron spheres cool in Buffon's own forge at Montbard, and the distribution of living species across climate zones, and weaves these into a cumulative inductive case in which each line of evidence corroborates the others. The technique is no longer antiquarian but probabilistic—Buffon had, after all, published a French translation of Newton's Method of Fluxions in 1740, and would publish original work on the probability that a needle tossed on a ruled floor should cross a line, the problem that bears his name in modern geometric probability. When the Époques reached Edinburgh and Cambridge in the 1780s, it announced to Anglophone readers that the earth's antiquity had become a quantitative problem rather than a scriptural one. The core of the programme is the animal kingdom. Volumes 4 through 15 (1753–1767) treat the quadrupeds, in an arrangement that combines Buffon's natural-historical essays with Daubenton's anatomical descriptions—a division of labour Buffon defended in the Preface to volume IV and that Daubenton eventually came to resent, his name disappearing from the later volumes. The Oiseaux volumes (numbered I–IX on their title-pages but continuously as tomes XVI–XXIV on their half-titles, 1770–1783) are the work of Buffon with Philibert Guéneau de Montbeillard and the Abbé Bexon, and assume, decisively, that geographic distribution is a datum of zoology rather than an incidental fact about individual animals—a premise that commits the Histoire naturelle to the biogeographic thinking which Alfred Russel Wallace would systematise a century later. The Minéraux volumes (I–V, 1783–1788) extend the account to the inorganic world and conclude with the Traité de l'aimant, Buffon's last publication in his lifetime, accompanied by the atlas that the present set preserves. Lacépède's eight continuation volumes close the series with the Ovipares et Serpens, the Poissons (five volumes, 1798–An XII, drawing on the manuscript collections of Philibert Commerson), and the Cétacées (1804)—the whole project begun under Louis XV and finished under the Consulate of Bonaparte. The plate programme, numbering 1,275 copper engravings including the portrait frontispiece of Buffon and twelve folding maps, was entrusted principally to Jacques de Sève and his son Jacques-Eustache de Sève, with additional designs by Buvée l'Amériquain, Oudry, and Baron, and engravings by Baquoy, Basan, Moitte, and Tardieu. De Sève père is the designing sensibility that defines the visual character of the Histoire naturelle: his quadrupeds stand in pastoral European landscapes—villages, rivers, mountains, ruins—that place each species within a habitat rather than isolating it on the diagrammatic ground of the pre-Linnaean iconotheca. The aesthetic choice is not decorative. It performs Buffon's thesis that species are functions of geography; the elk against a Norwegian spruce-line and the jerboa against a North African dune argue, in visual shorthand, a zoogeography that the text elaborates. The plates in the present set are in the original uncoloured state as issued by the Imprimerie Royale and its successor presses; the hand-coloured Planches enluminées of Edme-Louis Daubenton (1765–1786, 1,008 plates issued separately to accompany the de luxe folio edition of the Oiseaux) are a distinct publication and do not belong to the quarto edition. Buffon was born Georges-Louis Leclerc at Montbard in Burgundy on 7 September 1707, the son of a magistrate of the Estates of Burgundy who in 1714 inherited a substantial fortune from a maternal relative and acquired the lordship of Buffon — the toponym from which the future comte took the name by which he is universally known. He was educated by the Jesuits at Dijon, studied mathematics at Angers, and travelled in Italy and England in 1730–1733 in the company of the young Duke of Kingston and his Genevan tutor Nathaniel Hickman. Election to the Académie des Sciences followed at twenty-six, in 1734. His earliest publications were French translations of Newton's Method of Fluxions (1740) and Stephen Hales's Vegetable Staticks (1735, published 1735), and an original 1733 communication to the Académie on the geometric probability of a needle dropped at random across a ruled floor — the “needle problem” that bears his name in the founding literature of integral geometry. The 1739 appointment as Intendant du Jardin du Roi, secured through the patronage of Maurepas, gave him the cabinet, the printing privilege, and the institutional platform that the Histoire naturelle required. From 1739 onward his year was strictly bisected: October to April in Paris among the specimens, May to September at Montbard, where the great house, the gardens, the ducal tower, and (from 1768) an industrial-scale ironworks furnished both the writing room and the experimental laboratory. The Montbard forge is the experimental backbone of Buffon's late geological writing. From 1765 onward he conducted a sustained programme of cooling experiments in which iron and stone spheres of graduated diameter were heated to incandescence and the time required for them to cool to ambient temperature was measured under controlled conditions. Extrapolating from sphere to planet on the assumption that the earth had begun as a molten body progressively congealed, Buffon arrived at the published 75,000-year estimate of the Époques de la Nature and at the manuscript figure, three million years, that he allowed his students to read but did not put into print. The forge was simultaneously a working blast-furnace producing pig-iron for the Burgundian armaments trade — the revenue from which subsidised the publication and freed Buffon from dependence on royal subvention. The orangery at Montbard housed parallel experiments on plant respiration and the germination of seeds; the great walled garden was a controlled environment for testing the hardiness of imported species against Burgundian winters. The whole estate, in effect, was an early instance of the gentleman-natural-philosopher's establishment as instrument — comparable in scale to Tycho's Uraniborg, to Boyle's Stalbridge, or to Darwin's later Down House. The Histoire naturelle is the published face of this experimental enterprise. The literary reception of Buffon was nearly as consequential as the scientific. His 1753 reception address to the Académie française, the Discours sur le style (“le style est l'homme même”), became one of the most quoted statements of French neoclassical aesthetics and reframed the Histoire naturelle as a literary as well as a scientific monument. The set-piece elegies on the horse, the lion, the swan, the orangutan, and the dog were detached from the parent volumes and circulated as morceaux choisis; they remained obligatory recitation pieces in the French lycée through the Third Republic and were anthologised by Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi in 1855 as the model of mid-eighteenth-century French prose. Diderot read and annotated the early volumes for the Encyclopédie; Rousseau, with whom Buffon's relations were polite but distant, took the geographic-determinist passages as silent corroboration of his own anthropology; Voltaire, who shared Buffon's anti-Sorbonne instinct but resented his court success, kept up a guarded correspondence. The Smellie translation (Edinburgh, 1780–1785) and Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature (London, 1774, an avowed abridgment) carried the work into the English-speaking world, where Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (1794–96) silently absorbed Buffon's transformist hints into its own evolutionary speculation. The afterlife of Buffon's argument runs straight through nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. Cuvier, lecturing at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle from 1795, treated the Histoire naturelle as the institutional charter of his own comparative-anatomical programme even while disputing its transformism. Lamarck, who had reorganised the botanical galleries under Buffon in 1788, developed his 1809 Philosophie zoologique by extending Buffon's observations of climate-driven variability into a fully transformist mechanism. Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) acknowledged in its preface that the eighteenth-century revolution in geological time had been Buffon's, and Darwin, in the historical sketch added to the third edition of the Origin (1861), placed Buffon at the head of the line of pre-evolutionary speculators — with the politically careful note that the Histoire naturelle had at one point been condemned by the Sorbonne. Thomas Jefferson, who owned the work at Monticello (Sowerby 1024 for volumes 1–31 and 637 for the Suppléments) and corresponded with Buffon about American zoology, was so stung by Buffon's thesis that New World fauna were degenerate forms of Old World types that he had the bones of an American moose shipped across the Atlantic to Paris as evidence in rebuttal — the most picturesque single episode in the trans-Atlantic reception history of the work. The German reception travelled along a separate but parallel channel: Goethe read the Époques in 1781 and absorbed its rhetoric of geological depth into his own morphological writing, and Alexander von Humboldt, whose Kosmos (1845–1862) is the nineteenth-century lineal descendant of the encyclopaedic ambition of the Histoire naturelle, repeatedly cited Buffon as the founder of the genre to which he conceived his own work as belonging. The scholarly modern editions — the Imprimerie Nationale Pléiade selection of 1954 under the editorship of Jean Piveteau, the 1971 Bibliothek Suhrkamp German selection edited by Jacques Roger, and Roger's own 1989 Fayard biography (translated as Buffon: A Life in Natural History, Cornell, 1997) — are all built on direct consultation of the original quarto edition, of which complete uniformly-bound contemporary sets remain the necessary collation copy. The Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle's Buffon: Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière bibliography (Pierre Lecouturier and Roger Hahn, 1972, supplemented by Jeff Loveland and others through the 2010s) confirms that no two contemporary sets are identical in title-page state, advertisement leaves, or the order of the prefatory matter, and treats the uniformly-bound quarto with a complete Minéraux atlas as the bibliographical reference state for the work. References: Printing and the Mind of Man 198 (Carter and Muir identify Buffon's priority in presenting the natural world as a single unified field) — Dibner, Heralds of Science 193 (described as the most celebrated treatise on animals ever produced) — Nissen ZBI 672 — Wellcome II, 267 — Norman 369–370 — Brunet I, 1376 (Brunet recommends that collectors always seek out this first quarto edition for the beauty of its engravings) — Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson 1024 and 637 — Evans, First Editions of Scientific Books, Berkeley exhibition 1934, no. 97. 45 volumes, 4to (242 × 188 mm), comprising the 44 text volumes and the separately-issued atlas to the Minéraux. 1,275 engraved plates, including the portrait frontispiece of Buffon and twelve folding maps, mostly by Jacques de Sève père and his son Jacques-Eustache de Sève, with further designs by Buvée l'Amériquain, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Nicolas Baron, engraved by Baquoy, Basan, Moitte, and Tardieu. Uniform contemporary French mottled calf, the spines gilt in compartments with small lozenge tools and two black morocco lettering-pieces, triple gilt fillet on the covers, marbled edges and matching Spanish-shell marbled endpapers; narrow blue silk ribbon markers at the heads of the spines. The completeness of the Minéraux atlas is unusual, and the uniformity of the calf binding across four imprints and fifty-five years of publication particularly so. A very fine set of one of the most substantial publishing undertakings of the eighteenth century.
Item #6665
Price: $75,000.00
