Abstract
Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), considered during his lifetime a true star in the firmament of French Natural History, is viewed as the “inventor” (Antonello Gerbi) of the “natural inferiority theory” of America. His credo was that everything in the New World — plants, animals, humans — was smaller, inferior or even nonexistent, compared to the Old World, a situation which Buffon attributed to the natural conditions of America. Having come late to existence out of the waters of Genesis, the double continent was supposed to show all signs of a latecomer into world history, especially a humid, unhealthy topography — a climate hell that produces an abundance of small, retarded creatures. Although they represent only a scientific curiosity, the inferiority theories of the renowned Frenchman found a lively echo among the first writers of the Enlightment and sometimes far beyond that.
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