138 EVOLUTIONISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



He may be said to have asked all the questions 

 which were to be answered in the course of the 

 succeeding century. It is in this suggestiveness 

 that we find his chief merits. As St. Hilaire says, 

 his glory lies in what he prepared for his successors, 

 in his creation of a philosophy of Comparative 

 Zoology, his views of community of origin, laws of 

 geographical distribution, extinction of old species, 

 and successive apparition of new species. In order 

 to be fair to Buffon's followers, we must further test 

 the breadth of his conception by his application of 

 it to the succession of life ; and we here find in 

 numerous passages, as pointed out by Quatrefages, 

 that his conception was very limited. 



After having maintained in his first period the 

 extreme Special Creation view, and in his second 

 period, especially between 1761 and 1766, the 

 extreme transmutation view, he returned finally 

 to the moderate view, that species were neither 

 fixed nor mutable, but that specific types could 

 assume a great variety of forms. 



In his theorjf of Evolution, considering tempera- 

 ture, climate, food, and capillarity as the three 

 causes of change, alteration, and degeneration of 

 animals, he does not emplo)^ the terms heredity or 

 transmission of acquired characters, although it is 

 evident that these factors are implied. In other 

 words, Quatrefages points out, Buffon did not follow 

 his theory into its details. 



He also failed to reach the phyletic or branching 



