BUFFON 373 



in the air, reptiles, amphibians living in both air and 

 water ; cetacean, oviparous and boneless fishes, crus- 

 taceans, shells, land insects, marine insects, freshwater 

 insects, &c. He thinks it absurd to put the domesticated 

 dog into the order Ferce, whose name implies that it 

 consists of wild animals. It is better to call an ass an 

 ass, and a cat a cat, than to pretend that the ass is a 

 horse and the cat a lynx. 



Had Buffon kept his satire for what was really objec- 

 tionable in the Linnean classification, he would have 

 shown himself a more useful critic. There was fair 

 ground for complaint against any system of Mammalia 

 which put the bats with the monkeys, mixed up the 

 elephant, walrus, manatee, and edentates in one order ; 

 the carnivores, insectivores, and opossums in another. 

 Nor were the Linnean classes and orders of plants less 

 open to reproach. But Buffon in his wrath condemns 

 the whole without discrimination ; his objections, if they 

 could be maintained, would destroy, not the Linnean 

 arrangement only, but every other scientific arrangement 

 that has been proposed. 



I do not know that Linnseus ever mentions the name 

 of Buffon in his treatises. In his fragmentary Auto- 

 biography he says that Buffon was at last obliged, 

 nolens volens, to arrange the plants in the Jardin du 

 Eoi according to the Linnean system. According to 

 De Blainville,^ Buffon never allowed the Linnean system 

 to show itself in the garden, and only consented to 

 allow the Linnean names to be used on condition that 



^Hist. des Sciences de V Organisation, Vol. II, p. 386 n. It appears from 

 A. L. de Jussieu's Exposition d'un nouvel ordre de Plantes {Mdm. Acad. Sci., 

 1774, p. 177) that the system of Tournefort was retained in the Jardin du Roi 

 until 1773, when A. L. de Jussieu's system was substituted, both the binary 

 nomenclature of Linnseus and the natural families of the Jussieus being then 

 adopted. 



