EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 199 



ica, familiar with the great antiquity and autoch- 

 thonous origin of many kinds of animals and 

 plants, to note that Buffon, in common with all 

 his contemporaries, always conceived of the New 

 World as not only new in point of discovery, but 

 as new in its zoological evolution. He illustrated 

 his ideas as to the direct action of environment 

 in saying that Old World types, finding their 

 way into the New World, w^ould there undergo 

 modifications sufficient to cause us to regard 

 them as new species ; and in this connection Buf- 

 fon, in opposition to the general cataclysmal 

 teaching in the geology of his period, expresses 

 the uniformitarian idea that Nature is in a grad- 

 ual but continuous state of transition, and that 

 man must consider and observe changes which 

 are going on in his own period in order to under- 

 stand what has gone on in the past and what will 

 happen in the future. 



It is with such uniformitarian passages as 

 these that Buffon inspired later writers to con- 

 sider the great problem of Evolution. He may 

 be said to have asked all the questions and to 

 have stated all the problems which were to be an- 

 swered or to be solved in the course of the suc- 

 ceeding 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 succes- 

 sors, in his creation of a philosophy of compara- 



