 Buffon was able to exert such influence through the concrete institutional basis provided by the Jardin du Roi, with its attendant large Cabinet of specimens collected from all over the world. Under his leadership was created a preeminent center of research into comparative anatomy, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and biogeographical study (Spary 2000). By providing an institutional setting for these inquiries, the speculations and theoretical reflections of eighteenth-century natural historians could be subjected to organized critique and specialized examination in a context not found elsewhere in the natural-historical sciences of the period. Buffon’s theoretical vision provided a concrete framework against which those immediately associated with the Jardin were able to develop further reflections on such issues as the nature and duration of species, the significance of comparative anatomical studies, the historical relationships of forms, the meaning of fossils, and the systematic relations of living beings to one another. Only Buffon’s contemporary, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), Professor of Medicine and Botany at the University of Uppsala in Sweden after 1741, had similar authority in the domain of natural history, and Linnaeus did not have the resources and the institutional authority that characterized the Jardin in the last days of the Bourbon monarchy.