Buffon gets mentioned in the essay.
The author says, Read Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV., Montesquieu's Greatness and Fall of the Romans, Buffon's Epochs of Nature, the beautiful pages of reverie and natural description of Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar, and say if the eighteenth century, in these memorable works, did not understand how to reconcile tradition with freedom of development and independence.
“It took six hundred centuries for nature to construct her great works, to cool the Earth, to shape its surface and arrive at a tranquil state. How many centuries will be needed for men to arrive at the same point and cease to trouble, to agitate, and to destroy themselves?
When will they recognize that the peaceful working of the lands of their fatherlands suffices for their happiness?
When will they be wise enough to reduce their pretensions, to renounce their imagined dominance, relinquish their foreign possessions, often ruinous or at least more burden than use?” His hope is for “an equilibrium between the powers of the civilized peoples... that can be maintained, leading to a world at peace… Is there a single Nation that can boast to have arrived at the best government possible, which would make all men not equally happy, but less unequally unhappy?”
--Georges-Louis LeClerc, le Comte de Buffon
