IRONICAL CHARACTER OF BUFFON'S WORK. 87 



man of unquestionable genius, and that the times and 

 circumstances of his life were such as would go far to 

 explain reserve and irony — is it, I would ask, reasonable 

 to suppose that Bnflfon did not, in liis own mind, and 

 from the first, draw the inference to which he leads his 

 reader, merely because from time to time he tells the 

 reader, with a shrug of the shoulders, that he draws no 

 inferences opposed to the Book of Genesis ? Is it not 

 more likely that Buffon intended his reader to draw 

 his inferences for himself, and perhaps to value them 

 all the more highly on that account ? 



The passage to which I am alluding is as follows : — 

 " If from the boundless variety which animated nature 

 presents to us, we choose the body of some animal or 

 even that of man himself to serve as a model with which 

 to compare the bodies of other organized beings, we 

 shall find that though all these beings have an indivi- 

 duality of their own, and are distinguished from one 

 another by diflferences of which the gradations are in- 

 finitely subtle, there exists at the same time a primi- 

 tive and general design which we can follow for a long 

 way, and the departures from which {degenerations) are 

 far more gentle than those from mere outward re- 

 semblance. For not to mention organs of digestion, 

 circulation, and generation, which are common to all 

 animals, and without which the animal would cease to 

 be an animal, and could neither continue to exist nor 

 reproduce itself — there is none the less even in those 

 very parts which constitute the main difference in 

 outward appearance, a striking resemblance which car- 

 ries with it irresistibly the idea of a single pattern 



