Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998
The Man Who Invented Natural History
By Stephen Jay Gould
Buffon
by Jacques Roger, translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi
Cornell University Press, 492 pp., $49.95
An average nobleman in eighteenth-century France, including his wig, did not match the modern American mean. Nonetheless, at a shade under five five, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, struck his own countrymen as short of stature. Yet he bestrode his world like a colossus. When he died, in 1788 at age eighty, his autopsy, performed by his own prior mandate, yielded fifty-seven bladder stones and revealed a brain 'of slightly larger size than that of ordinary [men].' Fourteen liveried horses, nineteen servants, sixty clerics, and a choir of thirty-six voices led his burial procession. The Mercure reported:
Review, 6898 words
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