ANIMAL GRAFTS AND REGENERATIONS. 231 



a like power of reproduction. If considerable parts of its 

 body, either in the region of the head or that of the tail, 

 are removed, these fragments grow again in a very short 

 time. Bonnet saw a worm shoot out twelve heads in suc- 

 cession in this manner. At almost the same period, Spal- 

 lanzani went even further than the famous Geneva natural- 

 ist. He cut off the horns and even part of the head of the 

 shell-snail, and saw them grow out again. He cut off the 

 feet and tail of the water-salamander, and remarked their 

 restoration in the same way. This last fact, more extraor- 

 dinary than all the former ones, occasioned general sur- 

 prise. In fact, the feet and the tail of the salamander 

 contain bones, nerves, muscles, the reproduction of which 

 seemed impossible. Certainly, the tail removed from the 

 land-lizard had been observed to grow again, but without 

 bony vertebrae. On the contrary, the salamander's tail 

 grew anew with its complete bony frame, and of its original 

 size. The untiring Italian experimenter also showed that 

 the legs and tails of salamanders may be amputated several 

 times, and the same organ reproduced many times over, 

 with the same vitality. 



These memorable experiments of Reaumur, Trembley, 

 Bonnet, and Spallanzani, on the regeneration of animals, 

 of which Leibnitz had long before conjectured the results, 

 made a deep impression on Buffon's mind. He not only 

 perceived in them very curious facts of natural history, but 

 he also believed, as Bonnet did, that they gave force to 

 certain ideas of a very high order. He discovered in them 

 a wonderful demonstration of that conception of Leibnitz, 

 that animated beings are made up of an infinite number of 

 small parts, more or less resembling each other, that is, 

 that life does not dwell in the whole, but in each single 

 one of its unseen elements; or, in other words, to use a 

 phrase of Bordeu's, that the general life is nothing else 

 than the sum of a great number of special lives. That 



