He left no technical papers or memoirs, or what we would call contributions to science.

In his history of animals he began with the domestic breeds, and then described those of most general, popular interest, those most known.

He knew, as Malesherbes claimed, little about the works even of Linne and other systematists, neither grasping their principles nor apparently caring to know their methods.

His single positive addition to zooelogical science was generalizations on the geographical distribution of animals.

He recognized that the animals of the tropical and southern portions of the old and new worlds were entirely unlike, while those of North America and northern Eurasia were in many cases the same.
We will first bring together, as Flourens and also Butler have done, his scattered fragmentary views, or rather suggestions, on the fixity of species, and then present his thoughts on the mutability of species.
"The species" is then "an abstract and general term."[127] "There only exist individuals and _suites_ of individuals, that is to say, species."[128] He also says that Nature "imprints on each species its unalterable characters;" that "each species has an equal right to creation;"[129] that species, even those nearest allied, "are separated by an interval over which nature cannot pass;"[130] and that "each species having been independently created, the first individuals have served as a model for their descendants."[131] Buffon, however, shows the true scientific spirit in speaking of final causes.
"The pig," he says, "is not formed as an original, special, and perfect type; its type is compounded of that of many other animals.
It has parts which are evidently useless, or which, at any rate, it cannot use." ...