 The Epochs of Nature, which was separately printed (1779) and translated into German in 1781, offered a grand synthesis of historical cosmology, the history of the earth, and the history of life which was influential on several subsequent syntheses developed in German (Herder, Schelling), French (Lacépède) and possibly English (Chambers) natural history. Continuations of the special inquiries into animal groups after his death were made by his understudy Bernard de Lacépède (1756–1825), who extended Buffon’s general approach to the reptiles (1788–89), fishes (1798–1803) and cetaceans (1804). The “age of Buffon” became a defining era in natural history and established the King’s garden and its Revolutionary successor, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, as the foremost institutional center of natural-historical inquiry through the nineteenth century (Spary 2000: chp. 1; Blanckaert et al. (eds) 1997; Corsi 1983 [1988], 2001).