196 Address to the British Association 



truer insight into biological classification, and have led him 

 to endeavour to improve on Linnseus's system instead of only 

 criticising it. 



But it is Buifon's speculative views which have most 

 interest for us. Those views exercised a very widespread 

 influence in their day, though the time was not ripe for them. 

 Indeed, it is far from improbable that writers whose specula- 

 tions have been made public at a more propitious season owe 

 much to their comparatively forgotten predecessor. 



Amongst Buffon's various speculations we might glance 

 at his Thdorie de la Terre (put forth in the very first volume 

 of his work), and at his Epoques de la Nature, which fills the 

 fifth volume of his supplement. We might consider his 

 speculations concerning the formation of mountain and valley 

 by water, and the evidence that there was present to the ear 

 of his imagination — 



' The sound of streams, which, swift or slow, 

 Tear down ^olian hills, and sow 

 The dust of continents to be.' 



That he saw, in thought, the projection of the planets from 

 the sun's mass ; the primitive fluidity of the earth, and the 

 secular refrigeration of the sun. Such considerations, how- 

 ever, are foreign to this Section. I will therefore select tw^o 

 which are of biological interest. 



In the first place I may refer to Buffon's speculations 

 concerning animal variation. In this matter Isidore 

 Geoffrey St.-Hilaire has affirmed that Buffon stands to the 

 doctrine of animal variability in a position analogous to that 

 in which Linnaeus stands to the doctrine of the fixity of 

 species. 



Buffon, in his chapter on the animals of the Old and New 

 World, remarks : ^ ' It is not impossible that the whole ^ of the 



1 Op. cit., vol. ix. p. 127. 



2 He thought that the American Jaguars, Ocelots, etc., and even the 

 Peccary, were positive degradations of Old World forms. He also thought that 



