BUFF ON AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECIES 473 



subsist, the species will always remain wholly new. It is as much so to-day as 

 it was three thousand years ago. 18 



The reference here is primarily to the continuance rather than the 

 invariability of species. But the latter seems also to be implied; and 

 certainly Buffon does not improve the opportunity to introduce a hint 

 of the doctrine of mutability — as he could hardly have failed to do if 

 he had at this time held that doctrine and had been desirous of propa- 

 gating it. It must be remembered that these passages also were written 

 before Buffon's opinions had been censured by the Sorbonne. 



No account of Buffon's position in the history of biology can be other 

 than misleading which fails to note the decisive significance, for nearly 

 all of his positions from the second volume onward, of the peculiarly 

 Buffonian criterion of identity and diversity of species. Unless this 

 criterion (and the implied distinction between species and varieties, 

 which latter term covers many Linnaean species) be borne in mind, 

 most of the pages in the " Histoire Naturelle " which have an evolu- 

 tionistic sound are likely to misinterpreted. This is what has happened 

 in a number of the studies of Buffon's relation to evolutionism. The 

 error is especially conspicuously in Samuel Butler's " Evolution Old and 

 New." Butler has devoted nearly one hundred pages to a review of 

 Buffon's utterances on the subject; yet he nowhere lets his reader know 

 that Buffon was the propounder of a new definition of species, which 

 set up a radical distinction between species and varieties, and implied 

 that a species was a definite, objective, " natural " entity. The over- 

 sight is not due to any neglect of Buffon's to emphasize and reiterate his 

 definition. He recurs to it frequently in later volumes. His sense of 

 its importance was such that the question of hybridism and the limits 

 of fertility in cross breeding was one of the very few subjects which he 

 can be said to have studied experimentally on his own account. He 

 writes, for example, in 1755 : 



We do not know whether or not the zebra can breed with the horse or ass; 

 whether the large-tailed Barbary sheep would be fertile if crossed with our 

 own; whether the chamois is not a wild goat; . . . whether the differences 

 between apes are really specific or whether the apes are not like dogs, one 

 species with many different breeds. . . . Our ignorance concerning these ques- 

 tions is almost inevitable, as the experiments which would settle them require 

 more time, care and money than can be spared from the fortune of an ordinary 

 man. I have spent many years in experiments of this kind, and will give my 

 results when I come to speak of mules. But I may as well say at once that I 

 have thrown but little light on the subject and have been for the most part 

 unsuccessful. 19 



19 



"Hist. Nat.," Vol. II., p. 425. 



1 Vol. V., p. 63. The passage is given by Butler, but he shows no sense of 

 its general significance. 



(To be concluded) 



