"Let us consider any of the inferior species which serve as food to others, herrings, for example, present themselves …"

"Plants are only reproduced once a year, whereas in insects, especially among the smaller species, one season gives bi…"

"Born to destroy those beings which are subordinate, we should exhaust Nature if she were not exhaustless, and by a fe…"

"The stag, and most wild animals ... who suffer much from want in the winter, have no superabundance, nor are in a sta…"

"Buffon, the director of the Jardin du Roi... watched... the sun... Besides him.. stood... his latest experiment: four…"

"What better way to establish his name than to tackle the most fundamental philosophical question man could ask: When …"

"Le style c'est l'homme."

"Buffon produced in the fifty years from 1749 an Histoire Naturelle... one of the signal products of eighteenth-centur…"

"[F]rom the earliest periods of time [man] alone has divided the empire of the world between him and Nature. ...[H]e r…"

"La génie n'est utre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience."