BUFFON, Georges-Louis Marie Leclerc, Comte de (1757-1840). Oeuvres Complètes, Brussels, 1828-33, 20 volumes, large 8vo, 2 lithographed portraits, 2 maps, one table, 735 lithographed plates, many hand-coloured (one lacking), 19th-century calf gilt. (20)

BUFFON, Georges-Louis Marie Leclerc, Comte de (1757-1840).  Oeuvres Complètes ... Suivies de ses Continuateurs Daubenton, Lacépède, Cuvier, Duméril, Poiret, Lesson et Geoffrey-St-Hilaire. Brussels: chez Th. Lejeune, 1828-33. 20 volumes, large 8vo (242 x 155mm). Half titles, 2 lithographed portraits, 2 double-page maps, one double-page table, 735 lithographed plates, many hand-coloured, a few plates in the bird vol. heightened in gold, the text printed in double column (the second plate vol. lacking plate 76 [but plate numbering erratic], variable browning, spotting and staining to the plates throughout). Attractively bound in 19th-century half calf gilt and marbled boards, spines with red morocco lettering pieces (extremities rubbed). "Buffon's [work] presented for the first time a complete survey of natural history in a popular form ... [H]e opens his great work with an essay called Théorie de la Terre, in which for the first time he outlines a satisfactory account of the history of our globe and of its development as a fitting home for living things ... Buffon distinguished seven geological epochs and extended orthodox chronology, for he found it impossible to encompass the history of creation within six thousand years, which at that time was believed to be the age of the earth calculated from the history of the bible ... For Buffon there was nothing in man which gave him any peculiar pre-eminence. He is part of the animal creation and has to be fitted into a general picture of nature as a whole. This rejection of a rigid system of classification, to which most biologists of the time adhered, and Buffon's belief in the mutability of species, implied clearly some preparation for the thought of Darwin. Buffon lacked the scientific equipment to enable him to set all this out in terms completely acceptable to the modern mind, although his descriptive powers were considerable and his style is admirable. Nevertheless he was the first to present the universe as one complete whole and to find no phenomenon calling for any but a purely scientific explanation" (PMM, see reference below). cf. Brunet I, 488; Landwehr Studies in Dutch Books with Coloured Plates Published 1662-1875 46; Nissen ZBI 689; cf. PMM 198 (citing Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (Paris, 1749-1804, 44 vols.); Sitwell Fine Bird Books 1700-1900 p.83. (20)