8. Take the case of Bernard Palissy. He had 3 
great reputation, and still has in the eyes of some. 
He was a man of whom it was said by Buffon that he 
was so great a naturalist as nature only could pro¬ 
duce. Palissy himself describes the source of his 
fame by saying that he had had no other book than 
“ the heavens and the earth, which are known of all 
men, and given to all men to be known and read.” 
He was not Greek, he said, nor Hebrew, nor poet, 
nor rhetorician, but a simple artizan, poorly enough 
trained in letters. Yet what he, a simple artizan, 
might learn by putting himself to school with nature, 
he had come to consider as the highest learning. “ You 
will say,” he remarks, “ that you must not take heed 
to my speaking, inasmuch as I am neither Greek nor 
Latin, and have never even seen the volumes of the 
doctors. To this I answer that the ancients were 
men like the moderns, and that they were quite as 
liable to be deceived as wc are.” 
9. He therefore refused to recognise the “ wisdom 
of his ancestors,” and, turning away from books, he, to 
use his own words, “ scratched in the earth for the 
space of some sixty years and upwards, and searched 
among the entrails of the same, in order to under¬ 
stand the things which she produces in herself.” But 
look at the example in this museum of what he pro¬ 
duced. 
10. It cannot be denied that in the dish there pre¬ 
served he has represented natural objects with very 
considerable truth, and that the objects have in them¬ 
selves considerable beauty. No one can say that his 
lizard is not exceedingly like a lizard, or that the 
fish and other creatures belonging to the animal 
kingdom, are not skilful representations of objects 
