46 ELOGE Off BUFFOff. 



nature, not in the hope of painting it with his own 

 colours ; but as impossible to seize in any other man- 

 ner ; and without wishing to decompose all the rays of 

 his glory ; without separating the writer from the na- 

 turalist, the orator, and, if you please, the poet from 

 the philosophical observer. Let us endeavour to take 

 a glance at his work, which will give an idea, not of 

 each part, but of the whole. Let us examine, in ge- 

 neral, what must have been the object of the author, 

 and how he fulfilled that object ; what he wished to do 

 and what he really did. 



If his design had been only to give us a book where 

 all the known productions of nature should be deli- 

 neated, the greatness of this undertaking, of itself, 

 would astonish us, and make us admire the boldness of 

 a mind capable of such an idea ; for in each class of 

 the objects which natural history considers, a small 

 number of species has sometimes been sufficient to 

 occupy the whole life of laborious observers. Many 

 observers have acquired a just celebrity, by confining 

 their investigations to a single branch of the sciences 

 which are all here treated of; and rarely is an indivi- 

 dual found, whose mind could embrace all the parts of 

 study to which he devoted himself. It is a boldness, 

 therefore, well worthy of admiration, to regard at once 

 all the beings composing the universe, and to con- 

 ceive the plan, by observing their infinite varieties, 

 of becoming acquainted with and describing them all. 

 Buffon desired to do even more than this. The bodily 



