BUFFON— MEMOIR. 75 



contemporaries. One son was born to him, who entered 

 the army, became a colonel, and I grieve to say, was 

 guillotined at the age of twenty-nine, a few days only 

 before the extinction of the Eeign of Terror. 



Of this youth, who inherited the personal comeliness 

 and ability of his father, little is recorded except the 

 following story. Haying fallen into the water and 

 been nearly drowned when he was about twelve years old, 

 he was afterwards accused of having been afraid : " I 

 was so little afraid," he answered, " that though I had 

 been offered the hundred years which my grandfather 

 lived, I would have died then and there, if I could have 

 added one year to the life of my father ;" then thinking 

 for a minute, a flush suffused his face, and he added, 

 "but I shoidd petition for one quarter of an hour in 

 Vvhich to exult over the thought of what I was about to 

 do," 



On the scaffold he showed much composure, smiling 

 half proudly, half reproachfully, yet wholly kindly upon 

 the crowd in front of him. " Citoyens," he said, " Je me 

 nomme Buffon," and laid his head upon the block. 



The noblest oiitoome of the old and decaying order, 

 overwhelmed in the most hateful birth frenzy of the 

 new. So in those cataclysms and revolutions which 

 take place in our own bodies during their development, 

 when we seem studying in order to become fishes and 

 suddenly make, as it were> different arrangements and 

 resolve on becoming men — so, doubtless, many good 

 cells must go, and their united death cry comes up, it 

 may be, in the pain which an infant feels on teething. 



But to return. The man who could be father of 



