Buffon on Death and Fossils
This article addresses the association between death and fossils that Buffon developed across the thirty-six volumes of his Histoire naturelle and its implications for his literary project. Through a study of the connections between Buffon9s physiological theory of death, his fable of the first man, his anthropological treatment of funeral rites among non-European peoples, his statistical studies of life expectancy, and his personalized discussion of fossils at the end of his life, I argue that over the course of Buffon9s career the imaginative trope connecting death to ossification and petrification shaped both his natural philosophy and his literary project. This trope found its richest expression in Buffon9s last work, the Histoire naturelle des mineraux , which I interpret as his testament.