Overview and Identification
La statique des végétaux, et l’analyse de l’air (published in Paris in 1735) is a French translation prepared by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, of the English natural philosopher Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks (first issued in English in 1727). It is therefore not an original composition by Buffon but a scholarly translation, one of the earliest publications in the career of the man who would later become the most celebrated naturalist of eighteenth-century France. As with many of Buffon’s undertakings of this period, the translation was accompanied by a translator’s preface, in which Buffon set out his own view of the importance of the work and of the experimental method that it exemplified.
The book belongs to the genre of experimental natural philosophy, specifically the application of quantitative, measurement-based methods to living organisms and to the constitution of air. Hales’s original title in English announced the work as an account of “statical experiments on the sap in vegetables,” an essay toward a natural history of vegetation, together with a specimen of an attempt to “analyse the air.” Buffon’s French title faithfully renders this dual character: the “statics of plants” refers to the systematic weighing and measuring of plant processes, while the “analysis of air” refers to Hales’s investigations into the gaseous matter that could be released from, and absorbed into, various substances. The word statique here carries the sense of measurement by weight and quantity rather than the modern restricted sense of the mechanics of bodies at rest.
Author, Translator, and Context
The underlying scientific content of the book is the work of Stephen Hales (1677–1761), an English clergyman who combined his duties as a perpetual curate with a distinguished career in experimental physiology and chemistry. Hales was a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the foremost English experimenters of the generation after Isaac Newton. His Vegetable Staticks pioneered the quantitative study of plant physiology: he measured the movement of sap, the rates at which plants take up and give off water, the pressures exerted within plants, and the exchanges of matter between plants and the surrounding air. In doing so he brought to the study of living things the same insistence on measurement, weighing, and repeatable experiment that characterized the physical sciences of his day. The portion of the work devoted to the “analysis of air” is historically significant as an early contribution to what would later become pneumatic chemistry — the study of the different “airs” or gases — a field that would be transformed later in the century by investigators such as Joseph Priestley and, above all, Antoine Lavoisier.
The translator, Buffon (1707–1788), was at this stage a young man of scientific ambition who had not yet embarked upon the vast enterprise for which he is chiefly remembered, the Histoire naturelle. In the 1730s Buffon was establishing himself in the world of French learning; he was drawn to mathematics and to the experimental and Newtonian science then flowing across the Channel from Britain. His decision to translate Hales reflects the broader intellectual current of the period in which French savants sought to absorb and naturalize the achievements of English experimental philosophy, and to acquaint a Francophone readership with the empirical spirit associated with the Royal Society. Around this same phase of his career Buffon also engaged with Newton’s mathematics, further underscoring his role as an intermediary who helped bring British science into French intellectual life. The translation of Hales thus stands as an early document of Buffon’s formation as a man of science, before his appointment to the direction of the royal botanical garden and his emergence as a natural historian of European reputation.
Subject and Content
The subject matter transmitted through Buffon’s translation is Hales’s experimental inquiry into the physiology of plants and into the nature of air. On the botanical side, Hales’s approach was to treat plants as objects that could be weighed and measured, and to quantify the processes of vegetation. He examined how water passes through plants, the phenomenon by which plants lose water to the atmosphere, the forces and pressures involved in the rising of sap, and the general economy of matter in growing vegetation. His guiding conviction was that the life of plants could be studied by careful measurement and controlled experiment, rather than by speculation alone, and that regularities discovered in this way could form the basis of a genuine natural history of vegetation.
The second component of the work, the “analysis of air,” concerns Hales’s experiments on the fixation and release of gaseous matter. He investigated how air could be generated from, or absorbed into, a wide range of substances, and he developed experimental apparatus for collecting and handling gases. This work placed air firmly within the domain of chemical inquiry, treating it not merely as an inert medium but as something that participates in material processes and can be quantified. It is this dimension of Hales’s book that later chemists recognized as an important precursor to the systematic study of gases, and its inclusion in the French edition made these methods and results available to readers on the Continent.
Through his translation, Buffon rendered both parts of Hales’s inquiry accessible to a French audience, and his prefatory remarks framed the significance of the whole. Buffon’s preface is characteristic of his early advocacy of the experimental and quantitative approach to nature: it presents the value of methodical measurement and of drawing conclusions from carefully conducted trials, aligning the French reader with the empirical temper of the work being translated.
Place in Buffon’s Work and Significance
Within Buffon’s own body of work, La statique des végétaux, et l’analyse de l’air occupies the position of an early, formative endeavour that preceded his monumental Histoire naturelle. It belongs to the phase in which Buffon acted as a translator and interpreter of foreign science rather than as an original systematizer of nature. Yet the interests visible in this translation — the attention to living organisms, to the processes of vegetation, and to a rigorous, measurement-based method — anticipate concerns that would recur, in transformed shape, throughout his later career as a naturalist. The choice to translate a work uniting plant physiology with the analysis of air also reflects the breadth of Buffon’s scientific curiosity, spanning both the living and the material-chemical aspects of nature.
The significance of the book lies chiefly in its role as a conduit of ideas. By making Hales’s Vegetable Staticks available in French, Buffon contributed to the diffusion of English experimental natural philosophy in France and helped to establish the reputation of quantitative plant physiology and of the experimental study of air among Continental readers. The work of Hales, transmitted in part through this translation, formed part of the background against which later eighteenth-century developments in the chemistry of gases unfolded. As an artifact of Buffon’s intellectual biography, the translation illuminates the empirical and Newtonian formation of a naturalist who would go on to shape the study of nature in his century, and it stands as evidence of the lively exchange between British and French science in the decades before the mid-eighteenth-century flowering of natural history and chemistry.
