BUFFON FULLER QUOTATIONS. I/I 



contains a sentence which seems to be the germ that 

 has been developed, in the hands of Lamarck, into the 

 comparison between nature and a tree. Buffon says 

 that the chain of nature is not a single long chain, but 

 is comparable rather to something woven, " which at 

 certain intervals throws out a branch sideways that 

 unites it with the strands of some other weft." * On 

 the following page there is a passage which has been 

 quoted as an example of Buffon's contempt for the men 

 of science of his time. The writer maintains that the 

 most lucid arrangement of birds, would have been to 

 begin with those which most resembled quadrupeds. 

 " The ostrich, which approaches the camel in the shape 

 of its legs, and the porcupine in the quills with which 

 its wings are armed, should have immediately followed 

 the quadrupeds, but philosophy is often obliged to 

 make a show of yielding to popular opinions, and the 

 tribe of naturalists is both numerous and impatient of 

 any disturbance of its methods. It would only, then, 

 have regarded this arrangement as an unreasonable 

 innovation caused by a desire to contradict and to be 

 singular." t 



It is, I believe, held not only by "le peuple des 

 naturalistes" but by most sensible persons, that the 

 proposed arrangement would not have been an im- 

 provement. I find, however, in the preface to the third 

 volume on birds that M. Gueneau de Montbeillard 

 described all the birds from the ostrich to the quail, so 

 the foregoing passage is perhaps his and not Buffon's. 

 If so, the imitation is fair, but when we reflect upon it 

 * ' Oiseaux,' torn. i. pp. 394, 395. t Ibid. p. 396, 1771. 



