Daubenton, himself contributing only the most striking and rhetorical
passages. The book was very remarkable for its time, as the first
attempt since Pliny at a collection of physical facts at once
exhaustive, and in a manner systematised, and though there was much
alloy mixed with its metal, it was of real value. Buffon's life was
long, and he outlived all the other chiefs of the _philosophe_ party (to
which in an outside sort of fashion he belonged), dying at Paris in the
year 1788. It is perhaps easier to condemn Buffon's extremely rhetorical
style than to do justice to it. To a modern reader it too frequently
seems to verge on the ridiculous, and to do more than verge on the
trivial. It is necessary, however, to take the point of view of the
time. Buffon found natural science in a position far below that assigned
to literary erudition and to the arts in general estimation. He also
found it customary that these arts and letters should be treated in
pompous _eloges_. His real interest in science led him to think that the
shortest way to raise it was to treat it in the same manner, and there
is little doubt that his method was effectual in its degree. It is
perhaps curious that he, the author of the phrase 'Le style c'est
l'homme,' should have so completely exemplified it. Many authors of
elaborate prose have been perfectly simple and unpretentious in private
life. Buffon was as pompous and inflated as his style. Anecdotes
respecting him are numerous; but perhaps the most instructive is that
which tells how, having heard some one speak of the style of
Montesquieu, he asked, 'Si M. de Montesquieu avait un style?' It is
needless to say that from any just standpoint, even of purely literary
criticism, the hollow pomp of the _Histoire Naturelle_ sinks into
insignificance beside the nervous and solid yet graceful vigour of the
_Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Lesser Scientific Writers.]

No single scientific writer equals the fame of Buffon, but there are not
a few who deserve to be mentioned after him. Pierre Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis, a Breton by birth, who was a considerable mathematician and
a physicist of more eccentricity than merit, owes most of his literary
celebrity to the patronage of Frederick the Second, and the pitiless
raillery of Voltaire, who quarrelled with him on his visit to Berlin,
where Maupertuis was president of the Academy. Maupertuis' chief
scientific performance was his mission to Lapland to dete