BUFFON. 135 



idea. M. de Lanessan claims for him the position 

 which is usually accorded to Lamarck ; and, on the 

 other hand, other writers, such as Isidore St. Hilaire 

 and Haeckel, assign him a much less important 

 position. St. Hilaire shows clearly that his opin- 

 ions marked three periods. Quatrefages hardly 

 realizes the great influence exerted by the writings 

 of Buffon's middle period, when his views were 

 most extreme. Lanessan, his greatest admirer, be- 

 lieves that he has anticipated not only Lamarck in 

 his conception of the action of environment, but 

 Darwin in the struggle for existence and Survival 

 of the Fittest. There is no doubt that in some 

 passages Bui^on doubted not only the fixity, but 

 even the reality of species, genera, families, and 

 other taxonomic divisions ; also that he wrote of 

 the chain of organic life from the zoophytes to the 

 monkeys and man, thus borrowing from Aristotle 

 and suggestive of Bonnet and his famous scale. 



Buffon's ideas regarding the physical basis of 

 heredity are very similar to those of Democritus, 

 and certainly contain the basis of the conception 

 of the Pangenesis theory of Darwin, for he supposes 

 that the elements of the germ-cells were gathered 

 from all parts of the body. He does not expressly 

 sjjeak of the transmission of acquired characters as 

 a logical part of his theory of heredity, but such 

 transmission was undoubtedly in his mind, although 

 not clearly formulated as by Lamarck. 



He illustrates the direct influences of environ- 



