Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) was an eminent French naturalist who commented that the Atlantis story was an “ancient tradition that is not devoid of probability”. In 1749 Buffon speculated, in his Histoire et théorie de la terre, that the Mediterranean had been dry until an earthquake allowed the Atlantic to rush in and so destroy Atlantis. He surmised that Atlantis had been situated on the floor of that dry Mediterranean near Sicily. Buffon tantalisingly refers^(a) to the idea of a dry Mediterranean being supported by the testimony of the elders, but fails to quote the source of this testimony, although it is highly probable that he was referring to Strato and Seneca.

Buffon carried out extensive experiments in order to calculate the age of the earth. He arrived at a figure of around 75,000 years that ran counter to the views of his mid-18th century contemporaries^[680].

^(a) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Histoire_et_th%C3%A9orie_de_la_Terre