190 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



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 Epi- 

 cure, a Lucrece, a Aristote, a Platon, une imagi- 

 nation forte." This imagination made and un- 

 made Buffon, for it touched alike his soundest 

 and unsoundest speculations. 



In his early period Buffon shared the views as 

 to the fixity of species of his great contemporary 

 Linnaeus; in an early edition of the Histoire 

 Naturelle we find him using almost the exact 

 words of Linnaeus: "In animals, species are sep- 

 arated by a gap which Nature cannot bridge 

 over. . . . We see him, the Creator, dictating 

 his simple but beautiful laws and impressing 

 upon each species its immutable characters." 



It is therefore interesting to contrast these two 

 leading naturalists of an heroic period in zo- 

 ology — the one the founder of the view of clas- 

 sification as a fixed system of the divine order of 

 things and the ne plus ultra of botany and zo- 

 ology, the other the founder of the directly op- 

 posed view of classification as an invention of 

 man and of the laws governing the relations 

 of animals and their environment as the chief 

 end of science. Linnaeus opened his Systema 

 Naturce with the statement that the true great- 

 ness of man consists in his observing, reasoning, 



