Buffon's Natural History, long before Charles Darwin

Complete in Ten Volumes Containing Theory of Earth based on mathematics and logic....... Published, London, 1792. Contain together 3,127 printed pages, plus 80 engraved plates. His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including 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.
[1]Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century".
[2]Buffon held the position of attendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des Plantes.In the opening volumes of the Histoire naturelle Buffon questioned the usefulness of mathematics, criticized Carl Linnaeus's taxonomist approach to natural history, outlined a history of the Earth with little relation to the Biblical account, and proposed a theory of reproduction that ran counter to the prevailing theory of pre-existence.
The early volumes were condemned by the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne. Buffon published a retraction, but he continued publishing the offending volumes without any change.
He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionist. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody ... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.

All volumes tightly bound and presentable, in generally clean period leather bindings, which have some edge wear. Each volume very clean throughout within, a fair percentage of the plates having some staining at their upper ends, and which obviously appears to be an issue from publication, the text pages very clean. The stains however don’t impinge upon the engravings. Dimensions approximately: 7 1/2 by 5 inches