The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline: 1760-1850

A number of years ago I began a project to derme and evaluate the impact of Buffon's Histoire naturelle on the science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My attention, however, was soon diverted by the striking difference between the highly literary natural history of Buffon and the duller, but more rigor­ ous, zoology of his successors, and I began to try to understand this transformation of natural history into a set of separate scientific disciplines (geology, botany,...