312 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



FROM BUFFON TO DARWIN. 



By the Rev. T. R. R. Sobbing, M.A., F.R.S., F.L.S. 



[The Author has favoured us with the following revised report of his 

 Presidential Address to the First Congress of the South-Eastern Union 

 of Scientific Societies, held at Tunbridge Wells in May last.— Ed.] 



The Societies which have joined our Union are almost 

 exclusively Natural History Societies. They are quite friendly 

 to philosophy and literature, to mathematics and chemistry, to 

 agriculture and political economy, to astronomy and the use of 

 the globes, but they find their own more special and serious 

 employment in zoology, botany, and geology. Towards these 

 branches of knowledge the attitude of the public mind has changed 

 in an extraordinary manner during the last hundred and fifty years. 

 Fully to explain how this change has been brought about would 

 require a volume— such a volume as Sir John Lubbock, or Sir 

 Archibald Geikie, or Mr. Lecky might produce with fascinating 

 effect. My intention to-day is only to recall briefly to your 

 memories some of the more striking factors in the revolution. 



In the forefront may be set a certain number of men whose 

 work has had the distinctive quality of sooner or later exciting 

 enthusiasm. 



Of the French naturalist Buffon it has been said that " the 

 warmth of his style and the brilliancy of his imagination are 

 inimitable." In these days we are inclined to cavil when too 

 much of the imaginative element is introduced into descriptive 

 zoology, but Buffon had knowledge as well as brilliance, and was 

 able by this combination to win the attention of Christendom to 

 his accounts of the animal kingdom. Evidence direct and in- 

 direct of his merit and importance may be drawn from two very 

 different sources. The direct is found in the circumstance that 

 the famous French school of zoologists in the first half of this 

 century called their encyclopaedic history of animals ' Suites a 

 Buffon.' They were content to describe it as a continuation of 



