should not God
have impressed this movement upon the planets directly, as easily as
upon the comet to communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets
have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What
curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you
suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral
and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to
bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine
divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon
anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motive than the
interest he took in the discovery of truth and the perfection of a great
work.[21]

[Footnote 21: October, 1748. _OEuv._ ii. 782-784.]

Turgot's is probably the only case where the biographer has, in emerging
from the days of school and college, at once to proceed to expound and
criticise the intellectual productions of his hero, and straightway to
present fruit and flower of a time that usually does no more than
prepare the unseen roots. There is, perhaps, a wider and more
stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters
which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while
absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are
ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or
fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the
disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer
quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to
record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of
works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic
romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics,
morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the
plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of
view that belong even to the integrity of few works.

[Footnote 22: Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, 14.]

Before passing on to the more scientific speculations of this remarkable
intelligence, it is worth while to notice his letter to Madame de
Graffigny, both for the intrinsic merit and scope of the ideas it
contains and for the proof it furnishes of the interest, at once early
and profound, which he took in moral questions lying at the very bottom,
as well of sound character, as of a