GEORGES BUFFON

We have published two sets of prints (one of monkeys and one of dogs) from Buffon's famous Histoire Naturelle, a 44 volume work published in Paris in 1774. The encyclopaedia describes everything about the natural world, including the similarities of humans and apes, and even suggested common ancestry of Man and apes, a hundred years before Darwin.. Buffon believed in organic change, and thought that the environment acted directly on organisms through what he called "organic particles". Buffon was born into the French aristocracy and was educated in law and medicine, but his passion was nature. He searched for explanations of the natural world, beyond the accepted explanations of his time. Buffon's empirical approach paved the way for subsequent ground-breaking theories.