Georges-Louis de Buffon

Buffon emerges as Linnaeus's temperamental and intellectual opposite—a man whose privilege afforded him the freedom to think expansively and whose personality inclined him toward complexity rather than rigid order. Born into modest circumstances but transformed by inheritance into a landed nobleman, Buffon never experienced the desperate poverty that shaped Linnaeus's hunger for recognition. His early years of drinking and reveling at university suggest a young man untroubled by ambition, yet his grand tour with the Duke of Kingston awakened genuine passion for science. Unlike Linnaeus, who imposed Biblical certainty onto nature, Buffon approached the natural world with curiosity and humility, willing to acknowledge gradation, spectrum, and uncertainty. His recreation of the ancient light-heat beam and his development of probability theory (Buffon's Needle) reveal a mind that delighted in experimentation and mathematical elegance rather than mere cataloging.

As a scientist and writer, Buffon possessed a...