376 BUFFON 



distinct from the beginning ? ^ Is there blood-relation- 

 ship between quadrupeds, birds, reptiles and fishes? Are 

 there true families among plants and animals? If so, 

 had each of these families a common ancestor? Was 

 there a common ancestor to all animals ? ^ 



The questions are daring, but the answers which 

 Buffon gave in 1749 are orthodox enough even for the 

 Sorbonne. Eevelation teaches us, he says, that all 

 animals sprang fully formed from the Creator's hands. 

 What they once were that their descendants are now. 

 From the time of Aristotle no new species has been 

 known to make its appearance. If the ass was produced 

 by the degeneration of the horse, why do we not find 

 stages intermediate between the two ? Bufibn defines a 

 species as a succession of similar and interfertile indi- 

 viduals, excluding by the word similar the possibility of 

 progressive change. But by the time that his descriptions 

 of quadrupeds were drawing to a close, he was ready to 

 treat families and genera as souches, stocks from which 

 living branches had sprung. All his two hundred 

 quadrupeds might have been derived, he now thought, 

 from about forty original forms,^ and still stronger 

 opinions might be quoted from his later volumes. 



What Buffon came at length to see distinctly amounts 



^ " L'^ne et le oheval viennent-ils done originairement de la m^me souohe ? 

 Sont-ils, oomme le disent les nomenolateurs, de la m§me famille? Ou ne sont- 

 ils pas, et n'ont-ils pas toujours 4ti, des animaux difKrens ? " 



2 " Si Ton admet une fois qu'il y ait des families dans les plantes et dans les 

 animaux, que Vkne soit de la famille du cheval, et qu'il n'en diflffire que paroe 

 qu'il a d^g^ner^, on pourra dire ^galement que le singe est de la famille de 

 Thomme, que c'est un homme d^g^n^r^, que rhomme et le singe ont eu une 

 origine commune oomme le cheval et Vkne, que ohaque famille, tant dans les 

 animaux que dans les v^getaux, n'a eu qu'une seule souche, et m6me que tous 

 les animaux sent venus d'un seul animal, qui, dans la succession des temps, 

 a produit, en se perfeotionnant et en d^g^n^rant, toutes les races des autres 

 animaux." Tom. IV. 



= " D^gdn^ration des Animaux,'' Hist. Nat., Vol. XIV, p. 374, &o. 



