ssage. "Le
style," he says, "est comme le bonheur; il vient de la douceur de
l'ame."

Is it possible not to think of the following?--

"But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be
tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish
away ... and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the
greatest of these is charity."[38]

FOOTNOTES:

[37] 'Discours de Reception a l'Academie Francaise.'

[38] 1 Cor. xiii. 8, 13.

CHAPTER IX.

BUFFON'S METHOD--THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK.

Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the
possibility of method at all. "The true method," he writes, "is the
complete description and exact history of each particular object,"[39]
and later on he asks, "is it not more simple, more natural and more true
to call an ass an ass, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing
why, that an ass is a horse, and a cat a lynx."[40]

He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between
vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can
be founded on the nature of things themselves. He concludes that one who
could see things in their entirety and without preconceived opinions,
would classify animals according to the relations in which he found
himself standing towards them:--

"Those which he finds most necessary and useful to him will occupy the
first rank; thus he will give the precedence among the lower animals to
the dog and the horse; he will next concern himself with those which
without being domesticated, nevertheless occupy the same country and
climate as himself, as for example stags, hares, and all wild animals;
nor will it be till after he has familiarized himself with all these
that curiosity will lead him to inquire what inhabitants there may be in
foreign climates, such as elephants, dromedaries, &c. The same will hold
good for fishes, birds, insects, shells, and for all nature's other
productions; he will study them in proportion to the profit which he can
draw from them; he will consider them in that order in which they enter
into his daily life; he will arrange them in his head according to this
order, which is in fact that in which he has become acquainted with
them, and in which it concerns him to think about them. This order--the
most natural of all--is the one which I have thought it well to follow
in this volume. My classification has no more mystery in it