Every Living Thing

For much of the eighteenth century, two men raced each other to complete a comprehensive accounting of all life on Earth. At stake was not just scholarly immortality but the very nature of our relationship to nature—the concepts and principles we use to comprehend the living world.

The landscape of seventeenth-century Sweden was dotted with natural shrines. These were linden trees, viewed in a semi-mystical light by Swedes who associated their heart-shaped leaves and fragrant blossoms with Freyja, the Nordic goddess of love and fertility.

“How many plants have you collected and pressed?” Celsius asked.

“More than six hundred native wildflowers.” That was three times the number of surviving plants in the Botanical Garden.

Buffon’s indictment of systemist thinking, reaching a general audience for the first time, struck critics as particularly effective. “This attack is directed straight at the celebrated Linnaeus, an author, it is known, of a new system which destroys all previous ideas,” commented the Journal of Trévoux, which considered this section of Histoire Naturelle so persuasive it formally retracted its earlier praise of Linnaeus. “He [Buffon] shows the defects, even the ridiculousness of such a method.”

As to the names themselves, Linnaeus established a new structure. Each would henceforth contain two parts: a generic name, identifying the genus, and a specific name unique to the species.

Histoire Naturelle therefore began its grand tour of nature in the barnyard, describing only three animals—the horse, the donkey, and the bull—and taking 544 pages and 142,000 words to do so. This was a distinct departure from the usual approach of general-interest books on natural history, which sought to boost sales by trumpeting the exotic as quickly as possible.

It operated on three principles, which he dubbed the “rules of appointment.”

The first one: Use the historically oldest name for a species you can find. That meant reverting Linnaeus’s Actea back to the original ancient Greek term, Akokorion. But it also meant using indigenous names from the region of discovery.

The moule intérieur was Buffon’s term for nature’s general prototype, the mechanism molding, or giving form to, organic matter and dictating reproduction. While its literal meaning is “internal mold,” Buffon did not intend for it to be taken literally: A mold, by definition, cannot be on the inside of a form. Contemporary translators have concluded it might best be rendered in English as the “internal matrix.”

In contrast, Buffon was beginning to suspect that Earth’s inventory held far more than forty thousand species—and that the planet’s history held more species still. Like Linnaeus, he’d begun his work conceiving of life as a static subject, writing in the introduction to Histoire Naturelle that “we shall find, through all of Nature, that what can be, is.” But he was now revisiting that notion.

Under Linnean dominance, natural history focused on differences. Lamarck’s biology focused on commonalities, even across the so-called kingdoms of animal and vegetable. Linnean natural history had a mystery at its core: The mechanisms and principles by which it operated were simply aspects of divine intent. Lamarck’s biology was a discipline of dismantling, examining, and questioning.

Taking their cue from Darwin’s own half-hearted acknowledgment of Lamarck, Darwinists seized upon (and mocked) the image of a prehistoric short-necked giraffe, straining to reach tree branches until his neck miraculously grew. It was absurd, but equally absurd was suggesting Lamarck had meant anything remotely like it in the first place.

To exist is to coexist. To be is to be in conversation.

In Buffon’s own words, “Nature is not a thing, for this thing would be everything.”