Overview
The Epochs of Nature is Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s natural-philosophical history of the Earth, presented here in English translation with an editorial introduction and Buffon’s own extensive justifying notes. Its subject is not the author’s life but the physical history of the globe: the formation of the planets, the consolidation of the Earth’s rocky frame, the covering and retreat of the oceans, volcanic and seismic activity, the distribution of fossils and animal remains, the separation of continents, and finally the role of human beings in reshaping the surface of the Earth.
The work is organized as a “First Discourse,” followed by seven epochs, and then a set of “Justifying Notes.” The epochs are not modern geological periods in the technical sense; they are Buffon’s own stages in a speculative but evidence-driven account of how the Earth came to its present condition. The volume also includes an editorial introduction by Jan Zalasiewicz, Sverker Sörlin, Libby Robin, and Jacques Grinevald, which frames Buffon’s project and its relevance to later debates about Earth history and the idea of a human-dominated epoch.
Editorial Introduction
The introduction discusses Buffon’s place in the history of Earth science and explains the design of the work. It treats The Epochs of Nature as an early attempt at a comprehensive geological history, one that moves from the origins of the Earth and planets to the eventual cooling and ending of the world. The introduction also draws attention to Buffon’s treatment of evidence—rocks, strata, fossils, volcanoes, earthquakes, and sea-level change—and to the modern resonance of his final epoch, in which human activity becomes a force capable of modifying the Earth itself.
First Discourse
The opening discourse sets out Buffon’s plan and method. He proposes to trace the Earth’s physical history through successive epochs, explaining its present features by natural causes and by evidence drawn from the globe itself. The discourse establishes the scale and ambition of the work: it is a history of nature, not a chronicle of human events, and it seeks to account for the formation, alteration, and eventual future state of the Earth.
The Seven Epochs
First Epoch: When the Earth and the Planets Took Their Form
The first epoch presents Buffon’s cosmogony. He imagines the planets as having been torn from the Sun by the impact of a comet, with the Earth initially in a molten or fluid state. The epoch considers the formation of the Earth and the other planets, their cooling and consolidation, and the physical causes that shaped them. Buffon also touches on broader cosmological questions, including the nature of the Sun’s heat and the reason the Sun shines.
Second Epoch: When Matter, Being Consolidated, Formed the Interior Rock of the Globe and the Great Vitrescible Masses at Its Surface
The second epoch describes the consolidation of the Earth’s substance. Buffon distinguishes the interior rocky frame of the globe from the great “vitrescible” masses—the glassy or igneous-looking rocks—that appear at the surface. This is a stage of hardening, crystallization, and the formation of the Earth’s mineral foundation, before the later deposition of sedimentary layers.
Third Epoch: When the Waters Covered Our Continents
In the third epoch, Buffon describes a time when the oceans covered the continents. He explains the deposition of sedimentary layers and the presence of marine fossils in rocks now found on land. The epoch is central to his argument that the layered rocks of the Earth’s surface were formed under water and that the present land has emerged from an earlier marine condition.
Fourth Epoch: When the Waters Retreated and the Volcanoes Became Active
The fourth epoch concerns the retreat of the waters and the emergence of land. Buffon connects this stage with volcanic activity, earthquakes, and changes in sea level. He describes a physically active Earth in which subterranean heat, volcanic eruptions, and crustal movement help shape the surface and redistribute land and water.
Fifth Epoch: When the Elephants and the Other Animals of the South Lived in the North
The fifth epoch turns to fossils and animal remains. Buffon discusses evidence that elephants and other animals now associated with southern or tropical regions once lived in northern latitudes. He uses these remains to argue for former climates warmer than the present and for large-scale changes in the distribution of animals. The epoch also presents evidence for the disappearance of species, treating extinction as a real feature of Earth history.
Sixth Epoch: When the Separation of Continents Was Made
The sixth epoch explains the present separation of the continents. Buffon describes how landmasses that were once connected came to be divided by seas and by changes in the Earth’s surface. The epoch accounts for the geography of the modern world as the product of earlier physical transformations rather than as a fixed and original arrangement.
Seventh and Last Epoch: When the Power of Man Has Assisted That of Nature
The final epoch turns to human activity. Buffon considers how human beings—through settlement, agriculture, forest clearance, water management, and other modifications of the land—add to or redirect the forces of nature. He presents human power as a surface-changing agency capable of altering the Earth’s foundations. This is one of the work’s most striking features: an early geological glimpse of the idea that humans can modify the Earth on a planetary scale.
Justifying Notes
The volume includes Buffon’s “Justifying Notes,” in which he supplies further evidence and argument for the claims made in the epochs. The notes discuss, among other things, the vanished “monstrous” beasts of North America—what are now known as mastodons—and the possibility of human giants. They show Buffon defending his assertions with observations, comparisons, and learned commentary, and they expand the evidentiary basis of the main text.
Character of the Work
The Epochs of Nature combines speculative cosmogony with close attention to rocks, fossils, strata, volcanoes, earthquakes, and sea-level change. It treats the Earth as a body with a history: formed, cooled, covered by water, altered by subterranean heat, populated by animals that have shifted and disappeared, divided into continents, and finally modified by human beings. The work’s seven epochs give structure to that history, while the Justifying Notes show Buffon assembling evidence for a natural history of the globe that extends far beyond human records.
The Cooling Globe and the Order of Epochs
The unifying physical premise of the work is a cooling Earth. Buffon treats the epochs as successive consequences of that cooling and of the heat that remains within the globe. Heat and water are the two great geological agents: heat from the Earth’s formation and interior, water as ocean, vapor, sediment, and retreating sea. The sequence moves from a fiery and watery globe toward a mixed surface of land, sea, volcanoes, and sedimentary deposits. Present landforms are therefore residues of earlier states rather than fixed features of creation. This gives the epochs an internal causal order: each stage prepares or modifies the conditions of the next.
Fossils, Strata, and the Testimony of the Surface
The book reads the visible surface as evidence of former conditions. Fossil shells and marine remains in strata, volcanic products, earthquake effects, raised or submerged land, animal remains far from their present habitats, and the arrangement of continents and seas all serve as traces of past states. Fossils are not mere curiosities but historical documents; strata and marine deposits testify to an earlier sea; volcanoes and subterranean heat testify to the Earth’s interior activity. Buffon uses such traces to reconstruct former climates, former connections between landmasses, and the disappearance of animals. The Justifying Notes extend this evidentiary work by comparing observations and defending the main narrative’s claims.
Natural Chronology and the Status of Conjecture
The epochs imply a long and uneven natural chronology. Buffon constructs a history of the Earth internal to nature—inferred from physical processes and material remains—rather than a chronology organized around human records or dynastic time. The work is openly reconstructive: it combines conjecture about the Earth’s formation with empirical checks drawn from fossils, strata, volcanoes, and geography. Its argumentative force lies less in a single proof than in the convergence of many surface traces. The Earth thus becomes a historical body whose past must be inferred from its own monuments and remains, not simply narrated from human testimony.
The Human Epoch as Part of Natural History
The final epoch does more than list human modifications of the land. It places human activity within the same natural history that produced seas, strata, volcanoes, and continents. Human settlement, agriculture, forest clearance, and water management are treated as additions to or redirections of natural forces, so that the present age is both natural and humanly altered. The seventh epoch is therefore the one in which the reader still stands: it is the open, ongoing stage of the Earth’s history, distinguished from the completed epochs that preceded it.
Unity and Significance of the Work
The Epochs of Nature unites cosmogony, mineral geology, paleontology, geography, and human history in a single narrative of the globe. Its significance lies in that integration: the Earth is presented as a body with a legible history, whose past is recorded in strata, fossils, volcanoes, climates, and the distribution of animals and continents. The work’s seven epochs supply a structure for that history, while its Justifying Notes show Buffon assembling and defending the evidence for a natural history of the globe. The result is a speculative but evidence-minded account of the Earth as historical—dynamic, mutable, and still undergoing change in the age of human power.
