SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES XZI 



clear and easily comprehensive style. Moreover, besides these external quali- 

 ties, his work possesses immense practical advantages: it contains the idea 

 of a new and magnificent conception of natural science, and particularly of 

 biology, and its influence on the future development of the latter science has 

 been exceedingly great. 



BufTon began as a physicist; as we have already seen, he translated a 

 work of Newton's, and he also studied Leibniz; he had at once been struck 

 by the wonderful obedience to law that, according to the then new physical 

 and astronomical discoveries, governs the universe. In the light of these 

 discoveries the cosmos appears as a mighty piece of mechanism, which works 

 according to given laws, and in which both the past and the future can be 

 mathematically calculated. Is it not likely that in such circumstances the 

 phenomena here on earth, both in inanimate and animate nature, would also 

 be subject to a similar obedience to law? That is the question Buffon has put; 

 he has answered it in the affirmative and he has tried to give proofs of it. 

 His lasting service to science lies in the fact that he thus endeavoured to 

 incorporate biological phenomena in their entirety as a link in the great law- 

 bound world-process; thereby he made a great advance towards the goal that 

 our modern natural science has set itself, and progressed far beyond the mech- 

 anistic biologists of the seventeenth century, the Borellis, the Perraults, and 

 others who only sought to apply the laws of mechanics to the human body, 

 without any more universal objects in view. That Buffon, with the limited 

 material of facts available, could not succeed in creating a theory capable of 

 passing the test of modern knowledge is quite obvious, but that does not 

 prevent us from acknowledging the greatness inherent in his very ideas, and 

 the ingenuity with which he attempted to carry them out. 



His general vieivs 

 Buffon introduces his natural history with an account of the general princi- 

 ples on which he considers such a history should be written. Here he at once 

 expresses his view of nature as one whole, all of whose forces gear into one 

 another and all of whose manifestations stand in mutual causal connexion. 

 But at the same time he utters a warning, in words reminiscent of Bacon, 

 against bringing the multiplicity of nature under too simple points of view; 

 with an obvious allusion to Linnasus he warns us against those who speak, 

 for instance, of a mineral growing, and who compare in detail the organs of 

 animals with those of plants; it is, he says, trying to compel nature to come 

 under our arbitrary laws, not ascribing to the Creator more ideas than we 

 ourselves possess. The vast wealth of nature must rather be realized and ac- 

 knowledged from the beginning; the first causes of its phenomena will always 

 be hidden from us, and what remains to be done is to observe a number of 

 particular phenomena, compare them, and in them try to find a regular course 

 of events. It is thus impossible to create any universal system covering all 



