194 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



the counter evidence of zoology; it is sometimes 

 expressed in paragraphs which closely follow one 

 another, wherein it is difficult to decide whether 

 Buffon is ironical or not. Some passages are cer- 

 tainly written in irony. Referring, in one in- 

 stance, to his idea of unity of type, he seems to 

 imply that, in creating animals, the Supreme Be- 

 ing employed only a single idea, and at the same 

 time varied it in every possible manner:^ 



It is generally admitted that man, the quadruped, 

 the whale, the bird, the reptile, the insect, the tree, 

 the plant take food, grow, and reproduce by the same 

 law. The form of all that breathes is nearly the same ; 

 in dissecting the ape we could compare its anatomy 

 with man's. . . . This anatomical plan is always the 

 same, always followed from man to ape, from ape to 

 quadrupeds, from quadrupeds to whales, from whales 

 to birds, to fishes, to reptiles. . . . When we wish to 

 extend it and pass from what lives to what vege- 

 tates, we see this plan, which had not varied from the 

 beginning except by delicate gradations, alter grad- 

 ually from reptiles to insects, from insects to worms, 

 from worms to zoophytes, from zoophytes to plants. 

 . . . The very ones whose form seems to us most per- 

 fect — that is, most closely approaching our own — 

 the apes, appear together and require attentive eyes 

 to distinguish one from another, because it is less to 

 form than to size that the distinction of an isolated 



iBuffon: Histoire Naturelle. Vol. XIV (1766) of 1st edition, 

 pp. 27-30. See Appendix, p. 412, of Charles Darwin by Henshaw 

 Ward. 



