remembered the next
day. "I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician," was the
remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at
Paris; and he afterwards added,

"He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher,
a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions. Yesterday he made
quite five and twenty between nine o'clock and one, during which time he
remained in my room. O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those
gentry!"

The magistrate's mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist's
genius. Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was
said by Chevalier Chastellux, "his ideas got drunk and set to work
chasing one another." The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out
in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and
informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator. "The general
history of the world," he says, "ought to precede the special history of
its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and
habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants,
belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the
observations which have been made on the different materials which
compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and
the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the
trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and
effects of the currents of the sea--this is nature on the grand scale."

M. Fleurens truly said, " Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches."
Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon
belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province. In his
youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on
returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with
sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733,
adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he
received the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi,_ not long since
enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the
scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his
successor. He had shifted from mechanics to botany, "not," he said,
"that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and
forgotten three times," but he was aspiring just then to the _Jardin du