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 and agriculture, and his chief original papers are connected with these subjects. In the spring of 1739 he was elected an associate of the Academy of Sciences; and at a later period of the same year he was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi and of the Royal Museum. This appears to have finally determined him to devote himself to the biological sciences in particular, and he began to collect materials for his Natural History. In the preparation of this voluminous work he associated with himself L. J. M. Daubenton, to whom the descriptive and anatomical portions of the treaties were entrusted, and the first three volumes made their appearance in the year 1749. In 1752 (not in 1743 or 1760, as sometimes stated) he married Marie Françoise de Saint-Belin. He seems to have been fondly attached to her, and felt deeply her death at Montbard in 1769. The remainder of Buffon’s life as a private individual presents nothing of special interest. He belonged to a very long-lived race, his father having attained the age of ninety-three, and his grandfather eighty-seven. He himself died at Paris on the 15th of April 1788, at the age of eighty-one, of vesical calculus, having refused to allow any operation for his relief. He left one son, George Louis Marie Leclerc Buffon, who was an officer in the French army, and who died by the guillotine, at the age of thirty, on the 10th of July 1793 (22 Messidor, An II.), having espoused the party of the duke of Orleans.

Buffon was a member of the French Academy (his inaugural address being the celebrated Discours sur le style, 1753), perpetual treasurer of the Academy of Sciences, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and member of the Academies of Berlin, St Petersburg, Dijon, and of most of the learned societies then existing in Europe. Of handsome person and noble presence, endowed with many of the external gifts of nature, and rejoicing in the social advantages of high rank and large possessions, he is mainly known by his published scientific writings. Without being a profound original investigator, he possessed the art of expressing his ideas in a clear and generally attractive form. His chief defects as a scientific writer are that he was given to excessive and hasty generalization, so that his hypotheses, however seemingly brilliant, are often destitute of any sufficient basis in observed facts, whilst his literary style is not unfrequently theatrical and turgid, and a great want of method and order is commonly observable in his writings.

His great work is the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière; and it can undoubtedly claim the merit of having been the first work to present the previously isolated and apparently disconnected facts of natural history in a popular and generally intelligible form. The sensation which was made by its appearance in successive parts was very great, and it certainly effected much good in its time by generally diffusing a taste for the study of nature. For a work so vast, however—aiming, as it did, at being little less than a general encyclopaedia of the sciences—Buffon’s capacities may, without disparagement, be said to have been insufficient, as is shown by the great weakness of parts of the work (such as those relating to mineralogy). The Histoire naturelle passed through several editions, and was translated into various languages. The edition most highly prized by collectors, on account of the beauty of its plates, is the first, which was published in Paris (1749–1804) in forty-four quarto volumes, the publication extending over more than fifty years. In the preparation of the first fifteen volumes of this edition (1749–1767) Buffon was assisted by Daubenton, and subsequently by P. Guéneau de Montbéliard, the abbé G. L. C. A. Bexon, and C. N. S. Sonnini de Manoncourt. The following seven volumes form a supplement to the preceding, and appeared in 1774–1789, the famous Époques de la nature (1779) being the fifth of them. They were succeeded by nine volumes on the birds (1770–1783), and these again by five volumes on minerals (1783–1788). The remaining eight volumes, which complete this edition, appeared after Buffon’s death, and comprise reptiles, fishes and cetaceans. They were executed by B. G. E. de Lacépède, and were published in successive volumes between 1788 and 1804. A second edition begun in 1774 and completed in 1804, in thirty-six volumes quarto, is in most respects similar to the first, except that the anatomical descriptions are suppressed and the supplement recast.

BUG, the name of two rivers of Europe. (1) A stream of European Russia, distinguished sometimes as the Southern Bug, which rises in the S. of the government of Volhynia, and flows generally S.E. through the governments of Podolia and Kherson, and after picking up the Ingul from the left at Nikolayev, enters the liman or lagoon into which the Dnieper also discharges. Its length is 470 m. Its upper part is beset with rapids, and its lower is of little value for navigation on account of the numerous sandbanks and blocks of rock which choke its bed. (2) A river distinguished as the Western Don, which rises in the E. of Austrian Galicia between Tarnopol and Brody, and flows N.N.W. as far as Brest-Litovsk, separating the Polish provinces of Lublin and Siedlce from the Russian governments of Volhynia and Grodno; it then swings away almost due W., between the provinces of Warsaw and Lomza, and joins the Vistula, 23 m. below the city of Warsaw. Length, 470 m. It is navigable from Brest-Litovsk downwards.

BUG, the common name for hemipterous insects of the family Cimicidae, of which the best-known example is the house bug or bed bug (Cimex lectularius). This disgusting insect is of an oval shape, of a rusty red colour, and, in common with the whole tribe to which it belongs, gives off an offensive odour when touched; unlike the others, however, it is wingless. The bug is provided with a proboscis, which when at rest lies along the inferior side of the thorax, and through which it sucks the blood of man, the sole food of this species. It is nocturnal in its habits, remaining concealed by day in crevices of bed furniture, among the hangings, or behind the wall paper, and shows considerable activity in its nightly raids in search of food. The female deposits her eggs at the beginning of summer in crevices of wood and other retired situations, and in three weeks the young emerge as small, white, and almost transparent larvae. These change their skin very frequently during growth, and attain full development in about eleven weeks. Two centuries ago the bed bug was a rare insect in Britain, and probably owes its name, which is derived from a Celtic word signifying “ghost” or “goblin,” to the terror which its attacks at first inspired. An allied species, the dove-cote bug (Cimex columbaria), attacks domestic fowls and pigeons.

BUGEAUD DE LA PICONNERIE, THOMAS ROBERT, (1784–1849), marshal of France, was born at Limoges on the 15th of October 1784. He came of a noble family of Périgord, and was the youngest of his parents’ thirteen children. Harsh treatment led to his flight from home, and for some years about 1800 he lived in the country, engaged in agriculture, to which he was ever afterwards devoted. At the age of twenty he became a private soldier in the Vélites of the Imperial Guard (1804), with which he took part in the Austerlitz campaign of the following year. Early in 1806 he was given a commission, and as a sub-lieutenant he served in the Jena and Eylau campaigns, winning his promotion to the rank of lieutenant at Pultusk (December 1806). In 1808 he was in the first French corps which entered Spain, and was stationed in Madrid during the revolt of the Dos Mayo. At the second siege of Saragossa he won further promotion to the rank of captain, and in 1809–1810 found opportunities for winning distinction under General (Marshal) Suchet in the eastern theatre of the Peninsular War, in which he rose to the rank of major and the command of a full regiment. At the first restoration he was made a colonel, but he rejoined Napoleon during the Hundred Days, and under his old chief Suchet distinguished himself greatly in the war in the Alps. For fifteen years after the fall of Napoleon he was not re-employed, and during this time he displayed great activity in agriculture and in the general development of his district of Périgord. The July revolution of 1830 reopened his military career, and after a short tenure of a regimental command he was in 1831 made a maréchal de camp. In the chamber