"The essential characteristics of every animal have been conserved
without alteration in their most important parts. . . . The
individuals of each genus still represent the same forms as they did
in the earliest ages, especially in the case of the larger animals"
(so that the generic forms even of the larger animals prove not to be
the same, but only "especially" the same as in the earliest ages).
{177b}
This transparently illogical position is maintained ostensibly from first
to last, much in the same spirit as in the two foregoing passages,
written at intervals of thirteen years. But they are to be read by the
light of the earlier one--placed as a lantern to the wary upon the
threshold of his work in 1753--to the effect that a single,
well-substantiated case of degeneration would make it conceivable that
all living beings were descended from but one common ancestor. If after
having led up to this by a remorseless logic, a man is found five-and-
twenty years later still substantiating cases of degeneration, as he has
been substantiating them unceasingly in thirty quartos during the whole
interval, there should be little 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--especially 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 them after his death. It would be possible to reduce them
to a tenth part if we could rid them of all useless and foreign
matter, and of a prolixity which I find almost overwhelming; were this
only done, his books should be regarded as among the best we have on
the subject of natural history in its entirety. The plan of his work
is good, his classification distinguished for its good sense, his
dividing lines well marked, his descriptions sufficiently
accurate--monotonous it is true, but painstaking; the historical part
of his work is less good; it is often confused and fabulous, and the
author shows too manifestly the credulous tendencies of his mind.
"While going over his work, I have been struck with that defect, or
rather excess, which we find in almost all the books of a hundred or a
couple of hundred years ago, and which prevails still among the
Germans--I mean with that quantity of useless erudition with which
they intentionally swell out their works, and the result of which is
that their subject is overlaid with a mass of extraneous matter on
which they enlarge with great complacency, but with no consideration
whatever for their readers. They seem, in fact, to have forgotten
what they have to say in their endeavour to tell us what has been said
by other people.
"I picture to myself a man like Aldrovandus, after he has once
conceived the design of writing a complete natural history. I see him
in his library reading, one after the other, ancients, moderns,
philosophers, theologians, jurisconsults, historians, travellers,
poets, and reading with no other end than with that of catching at all
words and phrases which can be forced from far or near into some kind
of relation with his subject. I see him copying all these passages,
or getting them copied for him, and arranging them in alphabetical
order. He fills many portfolios with all manner of notes, often taken
without either discrimination or research, and at last sets himself to
write with a resolve that not one of all these notes shall remain
unused. The result is that when he comes to his account of the cow or
of the hen, he will tell us all that has ever yet been said about cows
or hens; all that the ancients ever thought about them; all that has
ever been imagined concerning their virtues, characters, and courage;
every purpose to which they have ever yet been put; every story of
every old woman that he can lay hold of; all the miracles which
certain religions have ascribed to them; all the superstitions they
have given rise to; all the metaphors and allegories which poets have
drawn from them; the attributes that have been assigned to them; the
representations that have been made of them in hieroglyphics and
armorial bearings, in a word all the histories and all fables in which
there was ever yet any mention either of a cow or hen. How much
natural history is likely to be found in such a lumber-room? and how
is one to lay one's hand upon the little that there may actually be?"
{180}
It is hoped that the reader will see Buffon, much as Buffon saw the
learned Aldrovandus. He should see him going into his library, &c., and
quietly chuckling to himself as he wrote such a passage as the one in
which we lately found him saying that the larger animals had "especially"
the same generic forms as they had always had. And the reader should
probably see Daubenton chuckling also.