pous
Olympian even in his home; in truth, if he was majestic--like a marshal
of France, as Hume describes him--he was also natural, genial, and
at times gay. His appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the Royal
Garden, now the _Jardin des Plantes_, turned his studies from
mathematical science to natural history.

The first volumes of his vast _Histoire Naturelle_ appeared in 1749;
aided by Daubenton and others, he was occupied with the succeeding
volumes during forty years, until death terminated his labours in
1788. The defects of his work are obvious--its want of method, its
disdain of classification, its abuse of hypotheses, its humanising
of the animal world, its pomp of style. But the progress of science,
which lowered the reputation of Buffon, has again re-established his
fame. Not a few of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have been
the divinations of genius; and if he wrote often in the ornate,
classical manner, he could also write with a grave simplicity.

In his _Discours de Reception_, pronounced before the French Academy
in 1753, he formulated his doctrine of literary style, insisting that
it is, before all else, the manifestation of order in the evolution
of ideas; ideas alone form the basis and inward substance of style.
Rejecting merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of natural
phenomena, viewing classifications as no more than a convenience of
the human intellect, refusing to regard final causes as a subject
of science, he envisaged nature with a tranquil and comprehensive
gaze, and with something of a poet's imagination. He perceived that
the globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long series
of changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to sound geological study;
he expounded the geography of species, and almost divined the theory
of their transformation or variability; he recognised in some degree
the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; he
regarded man as a part of nature, but as its noblest part, capable
of an intellectual and moral progress which is not the mere result
of physical laws.

Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as a thinker, he enlarged the
bounds of literature by annexing the province of natural history as
Montesquieu had annexed that of political science. His vision of the
universe was unclouded by passion, and part of its grandeur is derived
from this serenity. He studied and speculated with absolute freedom,
prepared to advance from his o