Buffon's place in the history of science is that of one who accomplished great things in spite of weaknesses peculiarly alien to the scientific spirit. It was mainly he who, by strenuous exertions and largely at his own cost, transformed the gardens from which the king's physicians used to procure their drugs into what we now know as the Jardin des Plantes. By the untiring labours of fifty years he produced a Natural History in thirty-six volumes crowded with plates. Having won for himself a place side by side with Montesquieu and Gibbon, he employed it to direct attention to the larger questions of biology and geology. He was a pronounced freethinker, who promulgated bold views with a dexterity which saved him from condemnation by the theological tribunals. When his opinions were declared to be contrary to the teaching of the Church, he printed a conciliatory explanation, but never cancelled the passages objected to, which continued to appear in a succession of editions. His deficiencies, we must admit, were serious. He was a poor observer (partly because of short sight), and had no memory for small details. His enemies were able to taunt him with absurd mistakes, such as that cows shed their horns. He alienated the two foremost naturalists of the eighteenth century, Linnæus and Réaumur, by ignorant and scornful criticisms. His strong propensity to speculation, insufficiently checked by care to verify, might have brought him under the sarcastic remark of Fontenelle, that ignorance is less apparent when it fails to explain _what is_, than when it undertakes to explain _what is not_. Buffon's fame is not seriously impaired by the fact that his great work is no longer read except by those who study the course of scientific thought. Few productions of the human intellect retain their value after a hundred years, and scientific treatises become obsolete sooner than others. It is consoling to recollect that, if their energy is quickly dissipated, it is at least converted into light.