566 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



extremely few passages which give some plausibility at least to the 

 theory that Buffon was continuously working towards an unqualified 

 transformism and actually arrived at that position in his later life. 

 But if he reached it (which his language just quoted does not quite 

 justify us in declaring) he did so only in a transient mood. For, as we 

 have already seen, in 1779, in the " Epoques de la Nature," we once 

 more find him asserting — though no longer upon the ground of the 

 sterility of hybrids — that the " constitutive form " of each separate 

 species is the same to-day as in " the earliest ages." 



5. It is more important, and it is commonly easier, to determine 

 what opinions a man's writings tended to encourage than to determine 

 what opinions he actually held. Mind-reading is perhaps no essential 

 part of the history of science. If, then, in conclusion, we raise the more 

 important question with respect to Buffon, it is evident that his work 

 both fostered and hindered the propagation of evolutionary ideas in 

 biology. Earlier than any other except Maupertuis, he put the hypoth- 

 esis of organic evolution before his contemporaries in a clear and defi- 

 nite form. He called to their attention, also, the facts of comparative 

 anatomy which constitute one of the principal evidences for that 

 hypothesis. Throughout the rest of the century we never cease to hear 

 about the wonderful " unity of type " characteristic of the vertebrates 

 and perhaps of all living things. It was this consideration which led 

 Kant as near to evolutionism as he ever came; Herder and Goethe are 

 full of it, though the former never admitted its full evolutionary con- 

 sequences; and all, it is evident, learned it directly from Buffon. He, 

 says Goethe, was the first to recognize eine ursprungliche und allge- 

 meine Vorzeichnung der Tiere. Buffon, moreover, once and for all in- 

 scribed upon the program of natural history, as its primary problems, 

 the reduction of the number of separate species to a minimum, the 

 derivation of highly divergent forms from a common origin through nat- 

 ural descent, and the discovery of the causes and methods of modifica- 

 tion. He, finally, did more than any one else to habituate the mind of 

 his time to a vastly (though not yet sufficiently) enlarged time-scale 

 in connection with the history of organic nature, a necessary prereq- 

 uisite to the establishment of transformism. 



These were great steps in the progress of evolutionism. But it is 

 equally true that Buffon probably did more than any other eighteenth 

 century writer to check the progress of evolutionism. He did so partly 

 by the authority which, for his contemporaries, attached to those per- 

 sonal utterances of his favorable to the doctrine of immutability. These 

 utterances were far more numerous and more categorical than those 

 which could be quoted on the other side; and they certainly were not 

 taken as ironical by the average reader of the period. But, what is still 

 more important, Buffon put into currency what passed for a scientific 

 and serious argument against any wholesale theory of descent. In the 



