 This simultaneous emergence of these two major figures in the natural historical sciences of the middle Enlightenment created a major rivalry of traditions of inquiry that would play out on several fronts. In Buffon, one had the model of the grand and eloquent theoretician of nature who developed major themes in Enlightenment natural philosophy and applied these to biological topics. In Linnaeus, one had a pious systematizer of the natural world of his era, whose monumental System of Nature (first edition 1735), along with numerous other works, formed the basis for modern biological classification. Their different approaches set the stage for a major theoretical conflict of traditions in natural historical science that would eventually be synthesized in the nineteenth century (Hoquet 2007).