Address to the British Association 195 



present time. Next came nine volumes on birds, then his 

 history of minerals, and, finally, seven supplementary volumes, 

 the last of which appeared in 1789, the year after his death. 

 His life was thus prolonged ten years beyond that of his 

 illustrious contemporary, Linnseus. 



BufFon can claim no merit as a classifier. With the 

 exception of the Apes of the old and new worlds (which 

 respectively fill the fourteenth and fifteenth volumes of his 

 work), the beasts treated of are hardly arranged on any 

 system, beyond that of beginning with the best known and 

 most familiar — a system necessarily applicable to but a few 

 forms. 



But Buff on deliberately rejected the Linnsean classification 

 — a grave error, certainly, yet one not altogether without 

 excuse. Indeed, some of the objections he brought against 

 that classification have considerable force. Such were his 

 objections to the association of the hippopotamus, the shrew- 

 mouse, and the horse in one order, and of the monkey and 

 the manis in another.^ What, indeed, could be more pre- 

 posterous than the separation of the bat, Noctilio leporinus, 

 from the other bats, and its association with the rodents, on 

 the ground of its having (as supposed) only two incisor teeth 

 above and two below ? — an anomaly of arrangement of which 

 you were reminded last year. It scarcely seems possible 

 for the pedantry of classification to go further than this. 

 Yet, perhaps, the association in one group of the walrus, the 

 elephant, the ant-eater, the sloth, and the manatee was 

 hardly less unphilosophical. Moreover, zoologists should not 

 forget, in blaming Buffon for his want of appreciation of the 

 classification of Linnaeus, that one great portion of that 

 classification — the classification of plants — has been super- 

 seded by us. Had he Hved to witness the publication of 

 Jussieu's Genera Plantariim^ it might have given him a 



^ Hist. Nat. tome i. p. 39. ^ This appeared in 1789. 



