Scientist, Author. He received notoriety in the late 18th century as a French scientist with the pioneer ideas of evolution. Written a hundred years before Charles Darwin's theory, Buffon, the name he was known in the scientific community, wrote the “History of Nature,” a 44-volume encyclopedia describing everything in the natural world and comparing the human man to apes. His first volumes was published in 1749 with the last ones in 1804, which were published posthumously. Although he did not provide a coherent reason for the occurrence, he believed in organic change. He openly suggested that the Earth was much older than the 6,000 years proclaimed by Christian church writings, and wrote about concepts very similar to Charles Lyell's “Uniformitarianism,” which was done forty years later. Historians state that Buffon paved the road for many other revolutionary scientists, who are responsible for what mankind knows about the world's nature, yet his thinking upset the Christian church. Although he had a great respect for Sir Isaac Newton, he rejected some of his theories too. He befriended Voltaire, who later said that Buffon's natural history “was not so natural”. He also contributed to the field of mathematics with his writings on probability, number theory and calculus. When the Minister of the French Navy requested assistance from him to test the tensile strength of timbers for ship building, he did a mathematical formula and then published “Memory on the Free-play Game,” which introduced differential and integral calculus into probability theory. As a result of this manuscript, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris on January 9, 1734. He was elected to the Royal Society of London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, where the Russian Czar Catherine II showered him with gifts. In Volume V of his encyclopedia, he wrote on the subject of “Theory of American Degeneracy,” claiming that people of North America were inferior than Europeans. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were greatly upset about this statement. From July of 1739 to 1788, he was the “keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens”, the Jardin du Roi, which would become part of the French National Museum of Natural History in 1793 and his position called “Director.” A talented young naturalist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was helping him with the gardens. Buffon married Francoise de Saint-Belin-Malain in 1752 and the couple had a son, Georges-Louis Marie Buffon, before his wife died in 1757. Later, as widower, Buffon sent his seventeen-year-old son with Lamarck, acting as a tutor, to tour Europe to learn about nature. The young man was not at all interested in the science of nature, but enjoyed the life that his father's wealth afforded him. Five years after his father's death, he son was beheaded by guillotine during the French Revolution. Born Georges-Louis Leclerc, the eldest child into a wealthy family of nobility, he was well-educated at Jesuit College of Godrans in Dijon, at his father's request, studying law, but excelling in mathematics. By 1727, he had befriended a Mathematician Garbiel Cramer, a professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 1728 he went to Angers, France to study medicine, mathematics, and botany. When he was ten, his family inherited an estate, The Buffon, from his mother's family. Upon his mother's death, he inherited the wealth along with the estate and was given the title of Count Buffon, thus changing his name to Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon by the age of twenty. He was buried initially in a chapel adjacent the church of Saint-Urse at Montbard, but during the French Revolution, his final resting place was violated. The lead from his coffin was used to produce bullets. His heart was saved and guarded by King Louis XVI finance minister, Jacques Necker's wife Suzanne, but later lost. Only the cerebellum of Buffon's brain survived this ordeal and was enclosed in the base of Buffon's statue at the French National Museum of Nature History in Paris. Commission by Louis XVI, the statue was created by sculptor August Pajou; Louis XVI had commissioned Pajou to do a bust of Buffon years earlier.