"Buffon produced in the fifty years from 1749 an Histoire Naturelle... one of the signal products of eighteenth-century science. ...He attempted to see nature as a whole, produced a vast synthesis and sought to give a picture of the history of the earth... [If] Newton had appeared to reduce the inanimate world to a system of law, Buffon... set his mind on a similar achievement, and even a wider one—comprising... biological phenomana and expanding into the realm of history. ...Along with Leibnitz he believed that the earth had once been in an incandescent state... part of the sun, but had broken away after a collision with a comet. He rejected the tradition that this globe was only six thousand years old and made an attempt to set out the periods or stages of its history; a time when mountain ranges were formed...a time when waters entirely covered... the globe... and a time when the continents came to be separated from one another. ...He held something like Leibnitz's idea that every plant and animal was composed of a mass of minute particles, each of which was a pattern of the whole individual; and this enabled him to explain the origin of living creatures without reference to an act of creation. He tried to show that no absolutely definite boundary existed between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Nature always proceeds by nuances, he said."