464 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



BUFFON AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECIES 



By Pbofessok ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 



THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 



THERE is no chapter of the history of the theory of organic evolution 

 more confused or more controverted than that which relates to 

 the position of Buffon. Upon one point, indeed, nearly all expositors of 

 the " Histoire Naturelle " are agreed — namely, that Buffon's own 

 expressions on the subject, if taken at their face value, contradict one 

 another. But upon the questions whether his utterances were meant to 

 be taken at their face value; whether, by a due consideration of dates, 

 the contradictions can not be regarded as consecutive steps in a logical 

 progress of doctrine; whether he was in the main a partisan or an 

 opponent of transformism : upon these questions both the biographers 

 of Buffon and the historians of evolutionism are greatly at variance. 



The rival interpretations fall into six groups: (1) Older writers of 

 the anti-evolutionary school, such as Cuvier and Flourens, while admit- 

 ting that (in the words of Flourens) "the ideas of Buffon were con- 

 stantly subject to profound mutations," were wont to maintain that in 

 the last analysis and in the long run he must be counted among the 

 defenders of the doctrine of immutability of species. Among recent 

 writers Packard gives a similar account ; while he recognizes " tenta- 

 tive " evolutionistic utterances in the " Histoire Naturelle," he opines 

 that Buffon himself " did not always take them seriously, but rather 

 jotted them down as passing thoughts." (2) One of the earlier French 

 evolutionists, Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 1 contended that there was no 

 mere fluctuation in Buffon's teaching, but simply an orderly movement 

 of thought from one position to another. 



Buffon does but correct himself; he does not fluctuate. He goes forward 

 once for all from one opinion to another, from what at the outset he accepted 

 on the authority of another to what he recognized as true after twenty years 

 of research. 



The successive phases of opinion through which, according to Isidore 

 Geoffroy, Buffon passed were three. At the beginning of his work 

 (1749) and down to 1756 or later, he "still shared the views of 

 Linngeus " and affirmed consistently the theory of immutability. From 

 1761 to 1766 he asserted the hypothesis of variability in an extreme 

 form. Later he became convinced that " in setting himself free from 

 the prevailing notions," he had, " like all other innovators, gone some- 



1 In his "Histoire Naturelle Generale, " Vol. II., 1859. His account is 

 translated in Butler's "Evolution Old and New." 



