ay be between the Hottentot and the monkey,
the interval which separates them is immense, since internally he is
garnished with mind and externally with speech."

Buffon continued his work, adroitly availing himself of the talent and
researches of the numerous co-operators whom he had managed to gather
about him, directing them all with indefatigable vigilance in their
labors and their observations. "Genius is but a greater aptitude for
perseverance," he used to say, himself justifying his definition by the
assiduity of his studies. "I had come to the sixteenth volume of my work
on natural history," he writes with bitter regret, "when a serious and
long illness interrupted for nearly two years the course of my labors.
This shortening of my life, already far advanced, caused one in my works.
I might, in the two years I have lost, have produced two or three volumes
of the history of birds, without abandoning for that my plan of a history
of minerals, on which I have been engaged for several years."

In 1753 Buffon had been nominated a member of the French Academy. He had
begged his friends to vote for his compatriot, Piron, author of the
celebrated comedy _Metromanie,_ at that time an old man and still poor.
"I can wait," said Buffon. "Two days before that fixed for the
election," writes Grimm, "the king sent for President Montesquieu, to
whose lot it had fallen to be director of the Academy on that occasion,
and told him that, understanding that the Academy had cast their eyes
upon M. Piron, and knowing that he was the author of several licentious
works, he desired the Academy to choose some one else to fill the vacant
place. His Majesty at the same time told him that he would not have any
member belonging to the order of advocates."

Buffon was elected, and on the 25th of August, 1754, St. Louis' day, he
was formally received by the Academy; Grimm describes the session.
"M. de Buffon did not confine himself to reminding us that Chancellor
Seguier was a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man,
that Kings Louis XIV. and Louis XV. were very great men too, that the
Archbishop of Sens (whom he succeeds) was also a great man, and finally
that all the forty were great men; this celebrated man, disdaining the
stale and heavy eulogies which are generally the substance of this sort
of speech, thought proper to treat of a subject worthy of his pen and
worthy of the Academy. He gave us his ideas on style, an