BUFFON AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECIES 469 



It was, then, the application of this principle to natural history 

 that was Buffon's main object in his preliminary discourse. The con- 

 sequences of it, when it was applied in this field, were simple and 

 evident and drastic : there can be no such thing as a " natural," or even 

 a consistent " system " of classification, since there are no sharp-cut 

 differences in nature, and since, therefore, species and genera are not 

 real entities but only figments of the imagination. It is easy, Buffon 

 wrote, to see the essential fault in the work of the systematists, the 

 inventors of " methods " as a class. 



It consists in an error in metaphysics in the very principle underlying these 

 methods. This error is due to a failure to apprehend nature's processes, which 

 take place always by gradations {nuances), and to the desire to judge of a 

 whole by one of its parts. 10 



Man, placing himself at the head of all created things and then ob- 

 serving one after another all the objects composing the universe, 

 will see with astonishment that it is possible to descend by almost insensible 

 degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter; ... he 

 will recognize that these imperceptible shadings are the great work of nature; 

 he will find them — these gradations — not only in the magnitudes and the forms, 

 but also in the movements, in the generations and the successions, of every 

 species. 11 If the meaning of this idea be fully apprehended, it will be clearly 

 seen that it is impossible to draw up a general system, a perfect method, for 

 natural history. . . . For in order to make a system or arrangement, everything 

 must be included, and the whole must be divided into different classes, these 

 classes into genera, and the genera into species — and all this according to an 

 order in which there must necessarily be something arbitrary. But nature pro- 

 ceeds by unknown gradations, and consequently can not wholly lend herself to 

 these divisions — passing, as she does, from one species to another species, and 

 often from one genus to another genus, by imperceptible shadings; so that 

 there will be found a great number of intermediate species and of objects 

 belonging half in one class and half in another. Objects of this sort, to which 

 it is impossible to assign a place, necessarily render vain the attempt at a 

 universal system. 12 



In short, the whole notion of species is inconsistent with the conception 

 of nature as a graded continuum of forms in which there are no breaks. 



In general, the more one increases the number of one's divisions, in the 

 case of natural products, the nearer one comes to the truth; since in reality 

 individuals alone exist in nature, while genera, orders, classes, exist only in our 

 imagination. 13 



The vogue of the principle of continuity in the eighteenth century 



10 "Hist. Nat., Vol. I., 1749, p. 20. 



11 These words are Buffon 's nearest approach in the introductory discourse 

 to a suggestion of the mutability of species. De Lanessan has interpreted them 

 as an affirmation of transformism; but they are too vague to justify such a 

 construction. 



12 "Hist. Nat.," Vol. I., 1749, p. 13. Much the same thing had, however, 

 been said by Eay over sixty years before; cf. "Historia Plantarum, " 1686, 

 I., p. 50. 



13 Op. cit., p. 38. 



