194 Address to the British AssociatioJt _ 



the other hand, not only are Buffon's claims on our esteem in 

 no similar way brought before us, but those very speculative 

 opinions of his, which are a merit in our eyes, gained him 

 disfavour with our immediate predecessors, whose opinions 

 and sentiments we more or less inherit. 



No one, however, can dispute Buffon's title to our grateful 

 respect on account of the very powerful effect his writings 

 had in stimulating men's love of nature, an effect which I 

 think is not sufficiently appreciated. 



It is fitting that I should call attention to his (once 

 generally recognised) claims in this respect; since my own 

 love of natural history is probably due to the circumstance 

 that his great work was one of the earliest mth which I was 

 familiar. 



Buffon was indeed Linnseus's contemporary, for the same 

 year (1707) saw the births of both. In 1733 he was elected 

 a member of the Academy of Sciences, and six years later 

 was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi} which 

 was the occasion of that work to which he is indebted for his 

 fame, and to perfect which he displayed so much zeal in 

 collecting specimens and in obtaining information respecting 

 the various kinds of animals with which he became ac- 

 quainted. His Histoire Naturelle gdnirale et particulUre 

 began to appear in 1749, and in 1767 was published the 

 fifteenth volume, which closed his history of mammals. 

 Herein are contained those numerous anatomical illustra- 

 tions (due, with their accompanying descriptions, to Dauben- 

 ton) which have been again and again copied do^vn to the 



1 The Jardin du Roi was first instituted by Louis xiii. in 1628, and 

 definitively established in 1635. It cannot be aflBrmed that Bufibn enriched 

 the incipient museum — the Cabinet du Hoi — so much as might have been 

 expected ; although the skeletons which served for Daubenton's descriptions 

 were, at least in many instances, preserved. It is to Geofi'roy St.-Hilaire 

 that the magnificent museum of the Jardin des Plantes, which now exists, is 

 most indebted. 



