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

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

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

"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 …"

"Man alone consumes more flesh than all the other animals together devour; he is, then, the greatest destroyer; and th…"

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

"Le style c'est l'homme."

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

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