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from the animals, even in his anatomical character, that he ought not 

 to be classed with them; and he expressed surprise that 'it has been 

 possible for a celebrated naturalist to place man in the rank of the 

 quadrupeds, and to associate him in the same class with the monkeys, 

 the lemurs and the bats.' 



Minds of another type, however, at once saw how the facts laid bare 

 by Daubenton demanded for their satisfactory explanation a hypothesis 

 such as Maupertuis had already come upon from another line of 

 inquiry. Even Buffon, as is well known, pointed out, in the 'Histoire 



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de l'Ane' in the fourth volume of the 'Histoire Naturelle, ' how forcibly 

 the homologies to which his colleague had called attention suggested 

 the idea of a family relationship between all animals. " If," he 

 wrote, "in the immense variety of animate creatures that people the 

 world, we choose as a starting point for our study. some one animal, or 

 even the body of man, and if we compare it with all the other organ- 

 isms, we shall find that . . . there exists a certain primitive and gen- 

 eral type (dessein) which can be traced out very far. . . . Even in the 

 parts which contribute most to give variety to the external form of 

 animals, there is a prodigious degree of resemblance, which inevitably 

 brings to our minds the idea of an original model upon which every 

 creature seems to have been conceived. ... As M. Daubenton has 

 remarked, the foot of a horse, in appearance so different from the 

 hand of man, is nevertheless composed of the same bones, and we have 

 at the extremities of our fingers the same small bone of horse-shoe 

 shape which terminates the foot of that animal." By one who con- 

 sidered these facts alone, "not only the ass and the horse, but also 

 man, the ape, the quadrupeds and all the animals might be regarded 

 as constituting but a single family. If it were admitted that the ass 

 were of the family of the horse, and differs from the horse only because 

 it has degenerated, one could equally well say that the ape is of the 

 family of man, that it is a degenerate man, that man and ape have a 

 common origin; that, in fact, all the families among the plants as well 

 as among the animals, come from a single stock; and that all animals 

 are descended from a single animal which in the course of time, as the 

 result of progress or of degeneration, has given rise to all the races of 

 other animals. ... If it were true that the ass is a degenerated variety 

 of the horse, there would be no longer any limits to the power of 

 Nature, and one would not be wrong in supposing that from a single 

 being she has been able to derive all the other organized beings. ' ' But 

 of course Buffon finally pronounced, at least nominally, against such 

 a supposition : Mais non; il est certain par la revelation que tous les 

 animaux ont egalement participe a la grace de la creation. Diderot, 

 however — although he was himself not wholly unpractised in per- 

 functory and ironical professions of orthodoxy — was somewhat more 



