EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS OF BUFFON 209 
arriving at any perfect system or method in dealing 
either with nature as a whole or even with any single 
one of her subdivisions. The gradations are so subtle 
that we are often obliged to make arbitrary divisions. 
Nature knows nothing about our classifications, and 
does not choose to lend herself to them without 
reasons. We therefore see a number of intermediate 
species and objects which it is very hard to classify, 
and which of necessity derange our system, whatever 
ie may be. = 
This is all true, and was probably felt by Buffon’s 
predecessors, but it does not imply that he thought 
these forms had descended from one another. 
“In thus comparing,” he adds, “all the animals, 
and placing them each in its proper genus, we shall 
find that the two hundred species whose history we 
have given may be reduced to a quite small number 
of families or principal sources from which it is not 
impossible that all the others may have issued.” + 
He then establishes, on the one hand, nine species 
which he regarded as isolated, and, on the other, 
fifteen principal genera, primitive sources or, as we 
would say, ancestral forms, from which he derived 
all the animals (mammals) known to him. 
Hence he believed that he could derive the dog, 
the jackal, the wolf, and the fox from a single one 
of these four species; yet he remarks, per contra, in 
Ae 
“ Although we cannot demonstrate that the pro- 
duction of a species by modification is a thing impos- 
* OMe: sip ls. +) DOME XivVeq. 11359. 
14 
