Appealing to a much wider public than Descartes or Leibnitz, and basing his speculations on a wider acquaintance with the organic and inorganic realms of nature, G.L.L. de Buffon (1707-1788) was undoubtedly one of the most influential forces that in Europe guided the growth of geological ideas during the 18th century. He published in 1749 a _Theory of the Earth_, in which he adopted views similar to those of Descartes and Leibnitz as to planetary evolution; but though he realized the importance of fossils as records of former conditions of the earth's surface, he accounted for them by supposing that they had been deposited from a universal ocean, a large part of which had subsequently been engulfed into caverns in the interior of the globe. Thirty years later, after having laboured with skill and enthusiasm in all branches of natural history, he published another work, his famous _Epoques de la nature_ (1778), which is specially remarkable as the first attempt to deal with the history of the earth in a chronological manner, and to compute, on a basis of experiment, the antiquity of the several stages of this history. His experiments were made with globes of cast iron, and could not have yielded results of any value for his purpose; but in so far as his calculations were not mere random guesses but had some kind of foundation on experiment, they deserve respectful recognition. He divided the history of our earth into six periods of unequal duration, the whole comprising a period of some 70,000 or 75,000 years. He supposed that the stage of incandescence, before the globe had consolidated to the centre, lasted 2936 years, and that about 35,000 years elapsed before the surface had cooled sufficiently to be touched, and therefore to be capable of supporting living things. Terrestrial animal life, however, was not introduced until 55,000 or 60,000 years after the beginning of the world or about 15,000 years before our time. Looking into the future, he foresaw that, by continued refrigeration, our globe will eventually become colder than ice, and this fair face of nature, with its manifold varieties of plant and animal life, will perish after having existed for 132,000 years.