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, and 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_.