Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was said by Chevalier Chastellux, "his ideas got drunk and set to work chasing one another." The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator.

"The general history of the world," he says, "ought to precede the special history of its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants, belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the observations which have been made on the different materials which compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and effects of the currents of the sea--this is nature on the grand scale." M.Fleurens truly said, " Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches." Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province.

In his youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733, adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences.

In 1739, he received the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi,_ not long since enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his successor.

He had shifted from mechanics to botany, "not," he said, "that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and forgotten three times," but he was aspiring just then to the _Jardin du Roi;_ his genius was yet seeking its proper direction.