To the _Theorie de la Terre,_ the _Idees generales sur les Animaux,_ and the _Histoire de l’Homme,_ already published when Buffon was elected by the French Academy, succeeded the twelve volumes of the _Histoire des Quadrupedes,_ a masterpiece of luminous classifications and incomparable descriptions; eight volumes on _Oiseaux_ appeared subsequently, a short time before the _Histoire des Mineraux;_ lastly, a few years before his death, Buffon gave to the world the _Epoques de la Nature_. “As in civil history one consults titles, hunts up medals, deciphers antique inscriptions to determine the epochs of revolutions amongst mankind, and to fix the date of events in the moral world, so, in natural history, we must ransack the archives of the universe, drag from the entrails of the earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us back to the different ages of nature. It is the only way of fixing certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number of memorial-stones on the endless road of time.” “This is what I perceive with my mind’s eye,” Buffon would say, “thus forming a chain which, from the summit of Time’s ladder, descends right down to us.” “This man,” exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which surprised him out of his scepticism, “this man gives to things which no human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence.” Some of Buffon’s theories have been disputed by his successors’ science; as D’Alembert said of Descartes: “If he was mistaken about the laws of motion, he was the first to divine that there must be some.” Buffon divined the epochs of nature, and by the intuition of his genius, absolutely unshackled by any religious prejudice, he involuntarily reverted to the account given in Genesis. “We are persuaded,” he says, “independently of the authority of the sacred books, that man was created last, and that he only came to wield the sceptre of the earth when that earth was found worthy of his sway.”