d it was said,
in consequence, that the Academy had engaged a writing-master."

"Well-written works are the only ones which will go down to posterity,"
said Buffon in his speech; "quantity of knowledge, singularity of facts,
even novelty in discoveries, are not certain guaranties of immortality;
knowledge, facts, discoveries, are easily abstracted and transferred.
Those things are outside the man; the style is the man himself; the
style, then, cannot be abstracted, or transferred, or tampered with; if
it be elevated, noble, sublime, the author will be equally admired at all
times, for it is only truth that is durable and even eternal."

Never did the great scholar who has been called "the painter of nature"
relax his zeal for painstaking as a writer. "I am every day learning to
write," he would still say at seventy years of age.

To the _Theorie de la Terre,_ the _Idees generales sur les Animaux,_ and
the _Histoire de l'Homme,_ already published when Buffon was elected by
the French Academy, succeeded the twelve volumes of the _Histoire des
Quadrupedes,_ a masterpiece of luminous classifications and incomparable
descriptions; eight volumes on _Oiseaux_ appeared subsequently, a short
time before the _Histoire des Mineraux;_ lastly, a few years before his
death, Buffon gave to the world the _Epoques de la Nature_. "As in civil
history one consults titles, hunts up medals, deciphers antique
inscriptions to determine the epochs of revolutions amongst mankind, and
to fix the date of events in the moral world, so, in natural history, we
must ransack the archives of the universe, drag from the entrails of the
earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a
body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us
back to the different ages of nature. It is the only way of fixing
certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number
of memorial-stones on the endless road of time."

"This is what I perceive with my mind's eye," Buffon would say, "thus
forming a chain which, from the summit of Time's ladder, descends right
down to us." "This man," exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which
surprised him out of his scepticism, "this man gives to things which no
human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence."

Some of Buffon's theories have been disputed by his successors' science;
as D'Alembert said of Descartes: "If he was mistaken about the laws of
mo