The Collaboration ‘manqué:’ Petrus Camper’s Son at Montbard, 1785-1787

The Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722-1789) was pleased that Buffon wanted to co-write a book on the natural history of whales. His son, Adriaan Gilles Camper (1759-1820), who was studying in Paris, went to Montbard to discuss this project. Although Jacques de Sève completed his engravings from Camper’s drawings at Buffon’s expense by 1786, the cetacean book was published posthumously, 30 years later, under Camper’s name only. Among the problems that led to their failed collaboration were differences about the division of the work, physical ailments, political problems, but, most of all, the fundamental clash between how they regarded natural history. Buffon prioritized reader-friendly natural history over that based on anatomical dissection, which was paramount to Camper. Camper wrote his son about Buffon that: “Despite his [anatomical] mistakes, he taught me by his example to envision things in the abstract, to mix them, etc.” Buffon’s “Discours,” on a new method for the life sciences, insisted that anatomical accuracies had to be integrated with synthetic laws. While his book detailed eight cetacean species, Camper also speculated which of their anatomical parts could be seen as variations of a common vertebrate structure. He drew a comparison of the whale skull with the human skull. Buffon’s discourse, published when Petrus Camper was only 27 years old, had evidently become Camper’s lifelong inspiration. The Campers’ incredible exertions to satisfy a hoped-for collaboration with the “great Buffon” can only be understood in the context that Petrus Camper acknowledged a great intellectual debt to Buffon in his own contributions.