IRONICAL CHARACTER OF BUFFON'S WORK. 93 



question how seriously we are to take him when he 

 wishes us to stop short of the conclusions he has 

 told us we ought to draw from the premises that he 

 has made it the business of his life to establish — espe- 

 cially when we know that he has a Sorbonne to keep a 

 sharp eye upon him. 



I believe that if the reader will bear in mind the 

 twofold, serious and ironical, character of Buffon's work 

 he will understand it, and feel an admiration for it which 

 will grow continually greater and greater the more he 

 studies it, otherwise he will miss the whole point. 



Buffon on one of the early pages of his first volume 

 protested against the introduction of either " plaisanterie" 

 or " equivoque " (p. 25) into a serious work. But I have 

 observed that there is an unconscious irony in most 

 disclaimers of this nature. When a writer begins by 

 saying that he has " an ineradicable tendency to make 

 things clear," we may infer that we are going to be 

 puzzled; so when he shows that he is haunted by a 

 sense of the impropriety of allowing humour to intrude 

 into his work, we may hope to be amused as well as 

 interested. As showing how far the objection to 

 humour which he expressed upon his twenty-fifth page 

 succeeded in carrying him safely over his twenty-sixth 

 and twenty-seventh, I will quote the following, which 

 begins on page twenty-six : — 



" Aldrovandus is the most learned and laborious of all 

 naturalists ; after sixty years of work he has left an 

 immense number of volumes behind him, which have 

 been printed at various times, the greater number of 



