Comte de Buffon

L'histoire Naturelle (link in French), the 44-volume magnum opus by Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, laid the foundations for encyclopedic natural history, and previsaged some later evolutionary ideas, such as common descent and the concept of the Bauplan. This year was his tercentennial, but unfortunately also that of his rival Linnaeus, whose status as the 'father of taxonomy' was widely celebrated although little of his science remains correct or relevant to us today. The same can be said of the Comte de Buffon, that "his ideas were essential in their day for the advancement of science, but consigned thereafter to oblivion." The Linnaean system, as set forth in the Systema Naturae and other books, is flawed and artificial, grouping say mosses and figs together in the class 'Cryptogamae' (hidden sexual organs), but it was too seductively simple and convenient to be resisted, especially in the great flowering of European exploration that followed in the 18th and 19th centuries which brought back hundreds and thousands of unknown species that needed to be classified in the great scheme of nature. It was this same simplicity and artificiality that Buffon correctly criticised, but the irony is that for all his mistakes and mundanity, Linnaeus is the one whom we remember today. It would be worth our while to pay him at least some fraction of the attention which we have showered on Linnaeus during this anniversary year.