han a fragment, has all the charms of
Montesquieu's delightful style; it is serious without pedantry, graceful
without levity, and is rich in observations that are precise and pointed
without the vice of emphasis. The great Turgot, diligently solicitous
for the success of every enterprise that promised to improve human
happiness by adding to knowledge and spreading enlightenment, wrote some
of the most valuable articles that the work contained, and his
discussion of Endowments perhaps still remains the weightiest
contribution to that important subject. Oddly enough, he was one of the
very few writers who refused to sign his name to his
contributions.[109] His assistance only ceased when he perceived that
the scheme was being coloured by that spirit of sect, which he always
counted the worst enemy of the spirit of truth.[110] Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who had just won a singular reputation by his paradoxes on
natural equality and the corruptions of civilisation, furnished the
articles on music in the first half dozen volumes. They were not free
from mistakes, but his colleagues chivalrously defended him by the plea
of careless printing or indifferent copying.[111] The stately Buffon
very early in the history of the Encyclopaedia sent them an article upon
Nature, and the editors made haste to announce to their subscribers the
advent of so superb a colleague.[112] The articles on natural history,
however, were left by Buffon in his usual majestic fashion to his
faithful lieutenant and squire-at-arms, Daubenton. And even his own
article seems not to have been printed. Before the eleventh volume
appeared, terrible storms had arisen, not a few of the shipmen had
parted company, and Buffon may well have been one of them. Certainly the
article on Nature, as it stands, can hardly be his.

In the supplementary volumes, which appeared in 1776--ten years after
the completion of the original undertaking--two new labourers came into
the vineyard, whose names add fresh lustre and give still more serious
value to the work. One of these was the prince of the physiologists of
the eighteenth century, the great Haller, who contributed an elaborate
history of those who had been his predecessors in unfolding the
intricate mechanism of the human frame, and analysing its marvels of
complex function. The other was the austere and generous Condorcet. Ever
loyal to good causes, and resolute against despairing of the human
commonwealth, he began in t