Various pp. Contemporary hardcover bindings with gilt lettering and tooling to spines. With portrait frontispiece of the author and various fine plates, collated and complete. Top edges stained dark brown. Condition: Good. Some rubbing, edgewear, scuffing and wear to boards and spines. Some of the slips on spines with author’s name have fallen off. Light browning to edges of endpapers and pastedowns. Some worming towards bottom edges of front pastedown, endpaper and first few pages of vol 1. Light smudges to pp 310-311 of vol 2. Vol 3 has some stains to its spine and front board. In vol 4 page 318 is incorrectly numbered as p. 381. In vol 7 page 62 is misnumbered as p. 2, and p373 misnumbered as p. 3. A few pencil marks to plate CCLXXI in vol 8. Texts and plates are overall clean, and all 8 volumes are still decently bound. Please also see photos for more details.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 – 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, since called the Jardin des Plantes. Buffon's works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.
Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century". Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was 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. (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon)
Edinburgh: William Creech, 1780
Size: 8vo (21,8 x 14cm)
- Overall Condition: Good
- Size: 8vo
