fair with the theologians of the
Sorbonne. Buffon was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made.

His forte was that of a brilliant writer and most industrious compiler,
a popularizer of science. He was at times a bold thinker; but his
prudence, not to say timidity, in presenting in his ironical way his
thoughts on the origin of things, is annoying, for we do not always
understand what Buffon did really believe about the mutability or the
fixity of species, as too plain speaking in the days he wrote often led
to persecution and personal hazard.[125]

His cosmological ideas were based on those of Burnet and Leibnitz. His
geological notions were founded on the labors of Palissy, Steno,
Woodward, and Whiston. He depended upon his friend Daubenton for
anatomical facts, and on Gueneau de Montbeliard and the Abbe Bexon for
his zooelogical data. As Flourens says, "Buffon was not exactly an
observer: others observed and discovered for him. He discovered,
himself, the observations of others; he sought for ideas, others sought
facts for him." How fulsome his eulogists were is seen in the case of
Flourens, who capped the climax in exclaiming, "Buffon is Leibnitz with
the eloquence of Plato;" and he adds, "He did not write for savants: he
wrote for all mankind." No one now reads Buffon, while the works of
Reaumur, who preceded him, are nearly as valuable as ever, since they
are packed with careful observations.

The experiments of Redi, of Swammerdam, and of Vallisneri, and the
observations of Reaumur, had no effect on Buffon, who maintained that,
of the different forms of genesis, "spontaneous generation" is not only
the most frequent and the most general, but the most ancient--namely,
the primitive and the most universal.[126]

Buffon by nature was unsystematic, and he possessed little of the spirit
or aim of the true investigator. He left no technical papers or memoirs,
or what we would call contributions to science. In his history of
animals he began with the domestic breeds, and then described those of
most general, popular interest, those most known. He knew, as
Malesherbes claimed, little about the works even of Linne and other
systematists, neither grasping their principles nor apparently caring to
know their methods. His single positive addition to zooelogical science
was generalizations on the geographical distribution of animals. He
recognized that the animals of the tropical and southern portions of the
old and new