Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), French naturalist. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was keeper of the French botanical gardens, and published the first volume of his Natural History in 1749. In it, Buffon proposed evolutionary ideas. He noted that some creatures had parts that were useless to them and wrongly deduced that parts, and maybe whole animals, might degenerate. He also thought that the Earth was formed by the collision of a large body with the Sun and that it might be up to 75000 years old, rather than the 6000 year limit set by the Bible. Illustration published in 1842.