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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a naturalist and exponent of the scientific movement tied to the Enlightenment, his theories influenced generations of naturalists, in particular the evolutionary Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. Buffon.
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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a naturalist and exponent of the scientific movement tied to the Enlightenment, his theories influenced generations of naturalists, in particular the evolutionary Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. Buffon
Buffon is well-known for his major work, "Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière". In his work Buffon included all the knowledge in the field of natural sciences. It is in this way that Buffon noted the similarities between man and ape, and the possibility of a common genealogy.
The attention paid to the internal anatomy places him among the initiators of comparative anatomy. Buffon had an edge over this subject, and had a much broader view of what the manifestations of life are than his colleagues. They had tried to study biological phenomena, but they ignored the enormous complexity of fauna and flora.
Buffon knew that, both plants and animals, are not fixed in form and function: when a particular species of plant or animal has given birth to an improved form, the previous version of the same disappears. Lamarck will later support many of his theories.
Buffon's training as a biologist allowed him to collect plants and animals and classify them by introducing a new method called Binomial classification. Instead of what was commonly believed, this method was initially proposed by Buffon and later improved by Linnaeus.
Erasmus Darwin Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous Charles, was a naturalist and a doctor. He supported the idea of a connection between historical species, and that animals could change when they encountered a different habitat. Erasmus thought that the creature born from a changed one, could inherit the new characteristics obtained from the changes.
Hutton James Hutton was a Scottish geologist. He is considered a founding father of modern geology. His view on the Earth's crust evolution, revolutionary for the times in which they were conceived, constitutes the starting point for many areas of Earth sciences.
James Hutton was the first one to understand the role of different agents in shaping the Earth's surface, and he had also realized the crucial role of time factor in geology. He was the first to understand how old the Earth was, many millions of years, not the 6000 years that were attributed on the basis of a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Smith William Smith were the first to study, in a scientific way, the distribution of fossils in the ground.
For many years, he went on studying fossils in different areas of England, dividing the ground in different places, distinguishing them according to the fossils he found there. Those particular fossils were called "Guiding fossils", and were the same in different areas, but only for the same level of stratification.
He didn't fulfill his objective, he couldn't interpret his data, but in the following years, his study became useful to conceive that the Earth was composed by more than one layer.
