84 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW 



rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that 

 Buffon'a puny lahour may well have been invisible to 

 him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some 

 of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward 

 tells us, as we shall see later on, that he "illustrated 

 this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty 

 administering sustenance to her infant." Buffon could 

 not have done anything like this. 



Buffon never, then, " arraigned the Creator for what 

 was wanting or defective in His works ;" on the contrary, 

 whenever he has led up by an irresistible chain of 

 reasoning to conclusions which should make men 

 recast their ideas concerning the Deity, he invariably 

 retreats under cover of an appeal to revelation. Natu- 

 rally enough, the Sorbonne objected to an artifice which 

 even Buffon could not conceal completely. They did not 

 like being undermined ; like Buffon himself, they pre- 

 ferred imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. 

 Buffon made his peace with the Sorbonne immediately, 

 and, perhaps, from that time forward, contradicted him- 

 self a little more impudently than heretofore. 



It is probably for the reasons above suggested that 

 Buffon did not propound a connected scheme of evolu- 

 tion or descent with modification, but scattered his theory 

 in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory 

 remarks with which he introduces the more striking 

 animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolu- 

 tionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; 

 and the more interesting the animal, the more evolutibn 

 will there be commonly found. When he comes to 

 describe the animal more familiarly — and he generally 



