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Updated: May 10, 2025
Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style, nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions all of them so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant intelligence off its guard could divert Turgot from the prime scientific duty of confronting a theory with facts.
This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its productions.
Erasmus Darwin, who has no small share of a very pleasant conscious humour, yet sometimes rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was about the common pump.
If every quiet country town in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey, New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece.
Following Buffon's idea of "order and movement," we may say, perhaps, that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of the form of the whole. It implies a sense of relations as well as of statement. It is, indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy.
The inorganic was as little reduced to system, and in its broadest aspect was not even looked at. Buffon's acute but for the most part empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton.
As to the degeneracy of the man of Europe transplanted to America, it is no part of Monsieur de Buffon's system. He goes, indeed, within one step of it, but he stops there. The Abbe Raynal alone has taken that step.
"However, facts are wanting, and these facts I doubt not I can soon procure, if not actual proof; and whichever way it goes, in favor of Buffon's Pongo or not, I shall be contented, so that I bring truth to light. "19th.
Although the work was widely translated, and was the only popular natural history of the time, there is little of it that is worthy of a place in the world's best literature. It is chiefly as a relic of a past literary epoch, and as the pioneer work in a new literary field, that Buffon's writings appeal to us.
My father now decided that I should not go to school, and he became my teacher as before, the world being my great book. I was delighted with Robinson Crusoe, and this work became my companion, and to which was added the Pilgrim's Progress. After these, my great favourite was Buffon's Natural History.
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