 In setting forth this new meaning of ‘species’ in natural history, and distinguishing it from the alternative meaning of species as a logical universal, Buffon was doing more than distinguishing the “category” from the “taxon” as these terms have come to be understood in contemporary philosophy of biology. In an important sense, Buffon introduced an opposition between these two meanings of “species” found in the tradition reaching back to Aristotle (see  Section 1.1  above), granting “reality” in biology only to species conceived as material successions of individuals sharing in the same internal mold spread out in time. By contrast, Buffon considered the understanding of species in the sense of a universal class concept as “abstract” and “artificial”.