tion, he was the first to divine that there must be some." Buffon
divined the epochs of nature, and by the intuition of his genius,
absolutely unshackled by any religious prejudice, he involuntarily
reverted to the account given in Genesis. "We are persuaded," he says,
"independently of the authority of the sacred books, that man was created
last, and that he only came to wield the sceptre of the earth when that
earth was found worthy of his sway."

It has often been repeated, on the strength of some expressions let fall
by Buffon amongst intimates, that the panorama of nature had shut out
from his eyes the omnipotent God, creator and preserver of the physical
world as well as of the moral law. Wrong has been done the great
naturalist; he had answered beforehand these incorrect opinions as to his
fundamental ideas. "Nature is not a being," he said; "for that being
would be God;" and he adds, "Nature is the system of the laws established
by the Creator." The supreme notion of Providence appears to his eyes in
all its grandeur, when he writes, "The verities of nature were destined
to appear only in course of time, and the Supreme Being kept them to
Himself as the surest means of recalling man to Him when his faith,
declining in the lapse of ages, should become weak; when, remote from his
origin, he might begin to forget it; when, in fine, having become too
familiar with the spectacle of nature, he would no longer be moved by it,
and would come to ignore the Author. It was necessary to confirm from
time to time, and even to enlarge, the idea of God in the mind and heart
of man. Now every new discovery produces this grand effect, every new
step that we make in nature brings us nearer to the Creator. A new
verity is a species of miracle; its effect is the same, and it only
differs from the real miracle in that the latter is a startling stroke
which God strikes instantaneously and rarely, instead of making use of
man to discover and exhibit the marvels which He has hidden in the womb
of Nature, and in that, as these marvels are operating every instant, as
they are open at all times and for all time to his contemplation, God is
constantly recalling him to Himself, not only by the spectacle of the
moment, but, further, by the successive development of His works."

Buffon was still working at eighty years of age; he had undertaken a
dissertation on style, a development of his reception speech at the
French Academy. Grea