BUFFON. 131 



a broad scale, the mutability of species in relation 

 to changes of environment. Moreover, he ad- 

 vanced beyond the Greek and philosophical evolu- 

 tionists, in first working out a definite theory of 

 the causes of mutability. His writings, which 

 cover the widest range of subjects, from Cosmogony 

 down to some of the minutiae of Zoology, undoubt- 

 edly exercised a great influence in England and in 

 Europe. He sowed the seed of suggestion in some 

 passages, which, it is true, were mostly speculative, 

 and these seeds germinated in the minds of the 

 later German Natural Philosophers, and among 

 Buffon's contemporary naturalists, while ripening 

 and bearing fruit in his successor, Lamarck, and 

 others, both in France and England. Buffon's 

 suggestiveness was one of his chief merits. It 

 sprang from an imagination which Diderot eulo- 

 gized : " Heureux le philosophe systematique a qui 

 la Nature aura donne comme autrefois a Epicure, 

 a Lucrece, a Aristote, a Platon, une imagination 

 forte. . . ." This imagination made and unmade 

 Buffon, for it touched alike his soundest and 

 unsoundest speculations. 



In his early period Buffon shared the views of 

 Linnaeus, his contemporary, and it is interesting to 

 contrast these two great men, one the founder of 

 the view of Classification as a fixed system of the 

 divine order of things, and the ne plus ultra of 

 Botany and Zoology the other the founder of 

 the directly opposed view of Classification as an 



