Charles-Georges Le Roy or Leroy (1723–1789) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 man of letters during the Age of Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 and the author of one of the first books on animal behavior.

Le Roy was a lieutenant of the royal hunt and a friend of the encyclopedists Diderot, d'Alembert and d'Holbach, regularly attending d'Holbach's salon

D'Holbach's Coterie

D'Holbach's Coterie was a group of radical French Enlightenment thinkers who met regularly at the salon of the atheist philosophe Baron d'Holbach in the years approximately 1750–1780...

.

Le Roy's publications began as texts on the behaviour and sensitivity of animals, published under the pseudonym of "the physician of Nuremberg." These appeared in the Encyclopédie méthodique

Encyclopédie Méthodique

The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières is a roughly 210 to 216 volumes encyclopedia that was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse...

in 1764.