Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton Hanna Roman (bio) Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy. Vols. VI and VII. Ed. Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011. In volumes IV (1753) and V (1755) of his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, the Count of Buffon fully articulates his understanding of the concept of species, notably in the articles “Le Cheval,” “L’Asne,” and “Le Chien avec ses variétés.” His definition of this controversial term emerged from his famous attack, in the “Premier discours” (in volume I, 1749), on botanical systems of classification and in particular on the taxonomy and nomenclature of the Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus. Buffon identifies species of animals not in terms of their defining characteristics and names, but in terms of the traceable, historical development and procession of a lineage of animals who can successfully reproduce with one another. This natural movement through time is adapted and refined by humans, who gradually come to play an important role—almost as powerful as that of nature—in the creation, definition, and perfection of a species by means of moving animals to different climates, domestication, and selective breeding. The horse, donkey, and dog all fit within Buffon’s project of ordering animals according to their utility and relative closeness to people’s everyday life. In many ways, their “species-ness” takes shape with respect to how humans train and interact with them. But what happens when we come to the study of animals less familiar to us, and less susceptible to our control and modification? Where, and how, does Buffon draw the line between the well-known animals of the household and barnyard, and those that exist beyond these walls, those who flee from and avoid the influence of people? An investigation of this question may be found in volumes VI (1756) and VII (1758) of the Histoire naturelle, which have both recently been published by Honoré Champion in 2011. These volumes are part of the ongoing—and necessary, for we have gone too long without a standard edition of Buffon’s most famous work!—re-transcription and annotation of the Histoire naturelle from its first-edition print run. In volumes VI and VII, Buffon transitions from domestic to wild animals through a series of important articles, notably “Le Chat” (an animal he considers half domestic and half wild 6: 101–14), “Les Animaux sauvages” (6: 149–54), and “Les Animaux carnassiers” (7: 101–30). From the titles alone of these articles, the modern reader gains no clue as to their actual content or meaning. These articles deliver less a guide to different [End Page 1060] species of wild animals than a discussion of both the intellectual and historical processes through which humans have come to define the marginal and the other, or that which is completely unlike them. These articles all function in differing ways as types of introductions, or framing discourses, to the histories and descriptions of specific wild animals contained within the volumes. They furnish the reader with the intellectual and conceptual tools to understand the process of distinguishing between savage and tame, between the natural world untouched by humans and that which they inhabit and modify. The articles provide methodological guidelines to show readers how to observe and rationalize those animals such deer, hares, otters, and wolves, just to name a few, that Buffon defines through their antagonistic relationship—and sometimes even lack of relationship—to humans. However, many of these tools and strategies would remain invisible to the modern reader of Buffon, were it not for the introductions and annexes to the text provided by the editors Stéphane Schmitt, researcher at the CNRS in Paris, and Cédric Crémière, director of the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle du Havre. As these editors have done in the previous five volumes of the Histoire naturelle (published between 2007–2010...