558 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



imprints upon every species its inalterable characters." In 1765 — that 

 is, at precisely the period during which we are told that Buffon " was 

 expressing very radical views on the mutability of species " — we find him 

 (in his " Second View of Nature," Vol. XIII.) giving his most extreme 

 expression to the doctrine of the reality and constancy of genuine 

 species. Here the language of the preliminary discourse concerning 

 the relative significance in nature of the species and the individual has 

 come to be completely reversed. 



An individual, of whatever species it be, is nothing in the universe; a 

 hundred, a thousand individuals are nothing. Species are the only entities of 

 nature (les seals etres de la nature) — perduring entities, as ancient, as permanent, 

 as nature herself. In order to understand them better, we shall no longer con- 

 sider species as merely collections or series of similar individuals, but as a whole 

 independent of number, independent of time; a whole always living, always the 

 same; a whole which was counted as a single unit among the works of the crea- 

 tion, and which consequently makes only a single unit in nature. . . . Time itself 

 relates only to individuals, to beings whose existence is fugitive; but since the 

 existence of species is constant, it is their permanence that constitutes duration, 

 the differences between them that constitute number. . . . Let us then give to 

 each species an equal right at nature's table; they are all equally dear to her, 

 since she has given to each the means of existing, and of enduring as long as 

 she herself endures. 25 



This sort of rhetoric is not the dialect of an evolutionist ; it is almost 

 that of a Platonist. And there is more in plainer language to the 

 same effect : 



Each species of both animals and plants having been created, the first indi- 

 riduals of each served as models for all of their descendants. . . . The type of 

 each species is cast in a mold of which the principal features are ineffaceable 

 and forever permanent, while all the accessory touches vary. 28 



Many years later still, in 1778, there appeared the sub-division of 

 the " Histoire Naturelle " which Buffon's contemporaries regarded as 

 his most brilliant and most significant work — the " Epoques de la Na- 

 ture." This was a resumption on a grander scale, and upon new prin- 

 ciples, of the task attempted in the " Theory of the Earth " in the first 

 volume, thirty years before — an outline of planetary evolution. To the 

 diffusion of evolutionary ways of thinking in the larger and vaguer 

 sense, this treatise was a contribution of capital importance. Into the 

 details of Buffon's geology I do not wish to enter in this paper. But it 

 is worth while for our purpose to recall one or two striking facts about 

 the " Epoques." In it the writer, whom a recent German historian of 

 biology has declared to have had a too little developed sense for the 

 historical or genetic aspect of nature, attempted, in a far more compre- 

 hensive, more definite and more impressive way than any of his prede- 

 cessors, to write the history of the gradual development of our planet 

 from the time when, an incandescent ball, it was separated from the 



^Vol. XIII., p. i. 



26 Vol. XIII., pp. vii, ix. 



