Geoscience Reference
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(1741-1819), a professor at the Jardin du Roi, for burial in Paris. His
brain was measured and found to be slightly bigger than normal - he
would have been pleased, although perhaps he suspected this fact,
given he was nicknamed 'Count Allproud' by some of his contempor-
aries. The medics also discovered numerous stones or calculi in his
bladder which must have been painful and a strain to deal with
towards the end of his life. Following a large and lavish funeral in
Paris viewed by up to twenty thousand spectators who lined the
streets, his body was returned to Montbard where it was laid to rest
in the family vault. Later during the troubled times of 'The Terror' that
gripped France in 1794 his coffin was stripped of its lead lining, which
was melted down for use as bullets: bullets in the sense of ammun-
ition and not in his sense of globes.
Buffon's empirical calculations based on the cooling rate of the
Earth rank among the most important measures of the Earth's anti-
quity, and were taken up with gusto by William Thomson from the
1850s onwards. Of course Buffon did not realise that the Earth has an
internal heat source that continues to provide heat and that the tem-
peratures that we now measure are simply not the residual heat left
over from its formation. With such a realisation Buffon would have
been nearly two centuries ahead of his time. As it was, his determina-
tion that the Earth was approximately 75,000 years old was too great a
duration for many of his conservative contemporaries to accept.
