194 MEMOIR OF DAUBENTON. 



Far from wishing to persuade by other means than the 

 evidence itself, he carefully excluded from his discourses 

 and writings every image and expression calculated to 

 seduce. Of unwearied patience, he never allowed him- 

 self to be discouraged by delay ; he recommenced the 

 same task till he had succeeded to his mind ; and, by a 

 method perhaps too rare among men occupied with 

 science of observation, all the resources of his mind 

 seemed to be united in imposing silence on his imagina- 

 tion. 



Buffon supposed that he had merely obtained a labo- 

 rious assistant, who would smooth for him the inequa- 

 lities of his path ; and he had found a faithful guide, 

 who pointed out to him the dangers and precipices. A 

 hundred times, the arch smile which escaped from his 

 friend, when he entertained some doubt, caused him to 

 revert to his first ideas ; a hundred times, one of the 

 words which that friend knew so well how to throw in, 

 arrested him in his precipitate progress ; and the saga- 

 city of the one becoming thus allied to the strength of 

 the other, tended to give to the history of quadrupeds, 

 the only one that was common to the two authors, the 

 perfection which renders it, if not the most interesting 

 of those which enter into Buffon's great Natural His- 

 tory, at least that which is freest from errors, and 

 which will be longest regarded as classical by natu- 

 ralists. 



It is, therefore, even less by what he did for him, 

 than by what he prevented him doing, that Daubenton 



