200 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
as too plain speaking in the days he wrote often led 
to persecution and personal hazard.* 
His cosmological ideas were based on those of Bur- 
net and Leibnitz. His geological notions were founded 
on the labors of Palissy, Steno, Woodward, and 
Whiston. He depended upon his friend Daubenton 
for anatomical facts, and on Gueneau de Montbéliard 
and the Abbé Bexon for his zodlogical data. As 
Flourens says, “ Buffon was not exactly an observer : 
others observed and discovered for him. He discov- 
ered, himself, the observations of others; he sought 
for ideas, others sought facts for him.”” How fulsome 
his eulogists were is seen in the case of Flourens, 
who capped the climax in exclaiming, “ Buffon is 
Leibnitz with the eloquence of Plato; and he adds, 
“He did not write for savants: he wrote for all man- 
kind.’”’ No one now reads Buffon, while the works of 
Réaumur, who preceded him, are nearly as valuable 
as ever, since they are packed with careful observa- 
tions. 
The experiments of Redi, of Swammerdam, and of 
Vallisneri, and the observations of Réaumur, had no 
* Mr. Morley, in his Rouwsseaz, gives a startling picture of the 
hostility of the parliament at the period (1762) when Buffon’s works 
appeared. Not only was Rousseau hunted out of France, and his books 
burnt by the public executioner, but there was “‘ hardly a single man of 
letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment” (p. 270); 
among others thus imprisoned was Diderot. At this time (1750-1765) 
Malesherbes (born 1721, guillotined 1794), one of the ‘‘ best instructed 
and most enlightened men of the century,” was Directeur de la Libraire. 
‘The process was this : a book was submitted to him; he named acen- 
sor for it; on the censor’s report the director gave or refused permission 
to print or required alterations, Even after these formalities were com- 
plied with, the book was liable to a decree of the royal council, a 
decree of the parliament, or else a lettre-de-cachet might send the 
author to the Bastille’ (Morley’s Aozsseau, p. 266). 
