BUFFON AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECIES 465 



what to the opposite extreme " ; and in all his writings subsequent to 

 1766 he held to a doctrine of " limited mutability," to the " permanence 

 of the essential features " of species and " the variability of details." 

 This division of Buffon's opinions into three periods, of which the middle 

 one was characterized by an extreme evolutionism, has been accepted by 

 a number of later writers. It is apparently adopted by Osborn, though 

 not to the exclusion of other interpretations inconsistent with it. 2 (3) 

 By several recent writers — such as Samuel Butler, de Lanessan, 

 Giard, Clodd — Geoffroy's scheme of three periods is rejected, and Buffon 

 is declared to have been an evolutionist throughout virtually his whole 

 career as a writer. Those who take this view explain away his apparent 

 self-contradictions by various suppositions. Giard, for example, holds 

 that Buffon began as a transformist, but was led by his difficulties with 

 the ecclesiastical authorities (in 1751) to conceal his real position for a 

 number of years, becoming bolder and more outspoken after 1761, when 

 his fame was securely established. In other words, Giard proposes an 

 alternative division into three periods, in which the middle phase is the 

 hast evolutionistic. Samuel Butler, who has taken the most extreme 

 ground of all in favor of the view that Buffon was a whole-hearted 

 evolutionist, endeavors at great length and with much ingenuity to show 3 

 that all the anti-evolutionary passages in the " Histoire Naturelle " are 

 ironical. According to this interpretation Buffon must almost be said 

 to have woven a sort of cryptogram into his work. " His irony is not 

 the ill-natured irony of one who is merely amusing himself at other 

 people's expense, but the serious and legitimate irony of one who must 

 either limit the circle of those to whom he appeals, or must know how 

 to make the same language appeal differently to the different capacities 

 of his readers, and who trusts to the good sense of the discerning to 

 understand the difficulty of his position, and make due allowance for it." 

 In other words, Buffon threw in sufficiently frequent affirmations of the 

 immutability of species to deceive, or at least to quiet, the doctors of the 

 Sorbonne, and in the very act of doing so he made it evident to the 

 judicious reader that the opposite conclusion was the one to be accepted. 

 The three remaining interpretations of Buffon's position are less 

 subtle and ingenious. (1) The author of the most comprehensive recent 

 history of biological theories 4 tells us that, though Buffon " speculated 

 aboiut the origination of one species from another," he did not 

 " especially interest himself in the question of the mutability of species ; 

 his too little developed sense for the historical [i. e., the genetic] aspect 

 of nature did not permit him to put clearly before himself such a ques- 

 tion as that concerning the origin of species. How should he have done 

 so, since he did not even believe in the existence of species, but recog- 



2 "From the Greeks to Darwin," 130-135. 



s In his "Evolution Old and New." 



"Radl, "Geseh. der biologisehen Theorien," I., 1905, pp. 117-118. 



VOL. LXXIX. — 32. 



