Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopédiste, Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle  during his lifetime. Histoire Naturelle was the most comprehensive and noted ornithological work of the 1700s. It included a broad variety of birds native to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He was described by Ernst Mayr as “the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.”