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He may even grow morbidly sensitive, like Buffon, who became so impressed with the delicacy and mystery of the human organization, that he was afraid to stoop even to pick up his own pen, when dropped, but called a servant to restore it. The artist, also, becomes often narrowed and petty, and regards the universe as a sort of factory, arranged to turn out "good bits of color" for him.
This theory, he told me the unbroken descent of living organisms and their physical connection with one another and with common parents had been a favourite idea from the beginning of history with many great thinkers, from Lucretius to Buffon and from Augustus of Hippo to Lamarck.
Pierre, that coming immediately after Rousseau and Buffon, and being one of the most proficient writers of the same school, he was in no degree their imitator, but perfectly original and new. He intuitively perceived the immensity of the subject he intended to explore, and has told us that no day of his life passed without his collecting some valuable materials for his writings.
It might be said that the orator has here acted like the nature of which Buffon speaks, that "he has worked on an eternal plan from which he has nowhere departed," so deeply does he seem to have entered into the familiar counsels and designs of providence.
Turkeys, by us short-sighted mortals, were often mistaken for pheasants; cocks and hens, for partridges; tame ducks and geese for wild; in short, such was our hurry and confusion leaping ditches, climbing dykes, and fording swamps that Buffon himself would never have known the difference between a goose and a peacock.
"Yes go! go! go! go! go!" said that officer, with an expression as though he considered our Cap an individual of the animal kingdom whom neither Buffon nor any other natural philosopher had ever classified, and who, as a creature of unknown habits, might sometimes be dangerous. Cap immediately availed herself of the permission, and went out to look for her servant and horses.
The last instance of such oppression occurred in France in the year 1756, when the great Buffon was required to recant certain opinions concerning the antiquity of the earth which he had published in his work on Natural History. This he promptly did, and in almost servile language withdrew all the opinions to which the fathers had objected.
He would take his music-lessons, follow his clandestine studies, in that favorable dress: thus Buffon, we hear, was wont to shave, and put on clean linen, before he sat down to write, finding it more comfortable so.
In truth, I devoted myself to it far more than I troubled myself about fame; fame comes afterwards, if it may, and it nearly always does." Buffon did not lack fame; on the appearance of the first three volumes of his "Histoire naturelle," published in 1749, the breadth of his views, the beauty of his language, and the strength of his mind excited general curiosity and admiration.
'They must die out, to borrow an emphatic expression from Buffon, 'because Time fights against them. If the views which I have taken are just, there will be no difficulty in explaining why the habitations of so many species are now restrained within exceeding narrow limits.
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