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 building was called the "Tour de St Louis," and here Buffon wrote most of his books and memoirs. Jean Jacques Rousseau, before he entered the "Tour," used to fall on his knees and kiss the threshold, stating that its possessor was the greatest zoologist of the age, and a master of style. Prince Henry of Prussia called this building "the cradle of natural history." Here Buffon wrote and worked for fifty years, frequently offending the Church by his evolutionary theories, which he retracted in order to please the Sorbonne—the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris. In 1751, when he was forty-four years of age, the Sorbonne condemned him to retract the heresy which he had made in publishing these words: "The waters of the sea have produced the mountains and valleys of the land; the waters of the heavens, reducing all to a level, will at last deliver the whole land over to the sea, and the sea successively prevailing over the land, will leave dry new continents like those which we inhabit." His recantation states that: "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the Creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."

The late Mr W. E. Gladstone, writing to Dr J. A. Lahm [sic] on the latter's book, Evolution and Dogma, said: