Chapter XIII: The Evolutionary Views of Buffon and of Geoffroy St. Hilaire

Of the French precursors of Lamarck there were four--Duret (1609), De Maillet (1748), Robinet (1768), and Buffon. The opinions of the first three could hardly be taken seriously, as they were crude and fantastic, though involving the idea of descent. The suggestions and hypotheses of Buffon and of Erasmus Darwin were of quite a different order, and deserve careful consideration.

George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was born in 1707 at Montbard, Burgundy, in the same year as Linné. He died at Paris in 1788, at the age of eighty-one years. He inherited a large property from his father, who was a councillor of the parliament of Burgundy. He studied at Dijon, and travelled abroad. Buffon was rich, but, greatly to his credit, devoted all his life to the care of the Royal Garden and to writing his works, being a most prolific author. He was not an observer, not even a closet naturalist. "I have passed," he is reported to have said, "fifty years at my desk." Appointed in 1739, when he was thirty-two years old, Intendant of the Royal Garden, he divided his time between his retreat at Montbard and Paris, spending four months in Paris and the remainder of the year at Montbard, away from the distractions and dissipations of the capital. It is significant that he wrote his great _Histoire naturelle_ at Montbard and not at Paris, where were the collections of natural history.

His biographer, Flourens, says: "What dominates in the character of Buffon is elevation, force, the love of greatness and glory; he loved magnificence in everything. His fine figure, his majestic air, seemed to have some relation with the greatness of his genius; and nature had refused him none of those qualities which could attract the attention of mankind.

"Nothing is better known than the _naïveté_ of his self-esteem; he admired himself with perfect honesty, frankly, but good-naturedly."

He was once asked how many great men he could really mention; he answered: "Five--Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself." His admirable style gained him immediate reputation and glory throughout the world of letters. His famous epigram, "_Le style est l'homme même_" is familiar to every one. That his moral courage was scarcely of a high order is proved by his little affair with the theologians of the Sorbonne. Buffon was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made.

His forte was that of a brilliant writer and most industrious compiler, a popularizer of science. He was at times a bold thinker; but his prudence, not to say timidity, in presenting in his ironical way his thoughts on the origin of things, is annoying, for we do not always understand what Buffon did really believe about the mutability or the fixity of species, as too plain speaking in the days he wrote often led to persecution and personal hazard.[125]

His cosmological ideas were based on those of Burnet and Leibnitz. His geological notions were founded on the labors of Palissy, Steno, Woodward, and Whiston. He depended upon his friend Daubenton for anatomical facts, and on Gueneau de Montbéliard and the Abbé Bexon for his zoölogical data. As Flourens says, "Buffon was not exactly an observer: others observed and discovered for him. He discovered, himself, the observations of others; he sought for ideas, others sought facts for him." How fulsome his eulogists were is seen in the case of Flourens, who capped the climax in exclaiming, "Buffon is Leibnitz with the eloquence of Plato;" and he adds, "He did not write for savants: he wrote for all mankind." No one now reads Buffon, while the works of Réaumur, who preceded him, are nearly as valuable as ever, since they are packed with careful observations.

The experiments of Redi, of Swammerdam, and of Vallisneri, and the observations of Réaumur, had no effect on Buffon, who maintained that, of the different forms of genesis, "spontaneous generation" is not only the most frequent and the most general, but the most ancient--namely, the primitive and the most universal.[126]

Buffon by nature was unsystematic, and he possessed little of the spirit or aim of the true investigator. He left no technical papers or memoirs, or what we would call contributions to science. In his history of animals he began with the domestic breeds, and then described those of most general, popular interest, those most known. He knew, as Malesherbes claimed, little about the works even of Linné and other systematists, neither grasping their principles nor apparently caring to know their methods. His single positive addition to zoölogical science was generalizations on the geographical distribution of animals. He recognized that the animals of the tropical and southern portions of the old and new worlds were entirely unlike, while those of North America and northern Eurasia were in many cases the same.

We will first bring together, as Flourens and also Butler have done, his scattered fragmentary views, or rather suggestions, on the fixity of species, and then present his thoughts on the mutability of species. "The species" is then "an abstract and general term."[127] "There only exist individuals and _suites_ of individuals, that is to say, species."[128] He also says that Nature "imprints on each species its unalterable characters;" that "each species has an equal right to creation;"[129] that species, even those nearest allied, "are separated by an interval over which nature cannot pass;"[130] and that "each species having been independently created, the first individuals have served as a model for their descendants."[131]

Buffon, however, shows the true scientific spirit in speaking of final causes.

"The pig," he says, "is not formed as an original, special, and
perfect type; its type is compounded of that of many other animals.
It has parts which are evidently useless, or which, at any rate, it
cannot use." ... "But we, ever on the lookout to refer all parts to
a certain end--when we can see no apparent use for them, suppose
them to have hidden uses, and imagine connections which are without
foundation, and serve only to obscure our perception of Nature as
she really is: we fail to see that we thus rob philosophy of her
true character, which is to inquire into the 'how' of these
things--into the manner in which Nature acts--and that we substitute
for this true object a vain idea, seeking to divine the 'why'--the
ends which she has proposed in acting" (tome v., p. 104, 1755, _ex_
Butler).

The volumes of the _Histoire naturelle_ on animals, beginning with tome iv., appeared in the years 1753 to 1767, or over a period of fourteen years. Butler, in his _Evolution, Old and New_, effectually disposes of Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's statement that at the beginning of his work (tome iv., 1753) he affirms the fixity of species, while from 1761 to 1766 he declares for variability. But Butler asserts from his reading of the first edition that "from the very first chapter onward he leant strongly to mutability, even if he did not openly avow his belief in it.... The reader who turns to Buffon himself will find that the idea that Buffon took a less advanced position in his old age than he had taken in middle life is also without foundation"[132] (p. 104).

But he had more to say on the other side, that of the mutability of species, and it is these tentative views that his commentators have assumed to have been his real sentiments or belief, and for this reason place Buffon among the evolutionists, though he had little or no idea of evolution in the enlarged and thoroughgoing sense of Lamarck.

He states, however, that the presence of callosities on the legs of the camel and llama "are the unmistakable results of rubbing or friction; so also with the callosities of baboons and the pouched monkeys, and the double soles of man's feet."[133] In this point he anticipates Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. As we shall see, however, his notions were much less firmly grounded than those of Erasmus Darwin, who was a close observer as well as a profound thinker.

In his chapter on the _Dégénération des Animaux_, or, as it is translated, "modification of animals," Buffon insists that the three causes are climate, food, and domestication. The examples he gives are the sheep, which having originated, as he thought, from the mufflon, shows marked changes. The ox varies under the influence of food; reared where the pasturage is rich it is twice the size of those living in a dry country. The races of the torrid zones bear a hump on their shoulders; "the zebu, the buffalo, is, in short, only a variety, only a race of our domestic ox." He attributed the camel's hump to domesticity. He refers the changes of color in the northern hare to the simple change of seasons.

He is most explicit in referring to the agency of climate, and also to time and to the uniformity of nature's processes in causing variation. Writing in 1756 he says:

"If we consider each species in the different climates which it
inhabits we shall find perceptible varieties as regards size and
form; they all derive an impress to a greater or less extent from
the climate in which they live. These changes are only made slowly
and imperceptibly. Nature's great workman is time. He marches ever
with an even pace and does nothing by leaps and bounds, but by
degrees, gradations, and succession he does all things; and the
changes which he works--at first imperceptible--become little by
little perceptible, and show themselves eventually in results about
which there can be no mistake. Nevertheless, animals in a free, wild
state are perhaps less subject than any other living beings, man not
excepted, to alterations, changes, and variations of all kinds.
Being free to choose their own food and climate, they vary less than
domestic animals vary."[134]

The Buffonian factor of the direct influence of climate is not in general of so thoroughgoing a character as usually supposed by the commentators of Buffon. He generally applies it to the superficial changes, such as the increase or decrease in the amount of hair, or similar modifications not usually regarded as specific characters. The modifications due to the direct influence of climate may be effected, he says, within even a few generations.

Under the head of geographical distribution (in tome ix., 1761), in which subject Buffon made his most original contribution to exact biology, he claims to have been the first "even to have suspected" that not a single tropical species is common to both eastern and western continents, but that the animals common to both continents are those adapted to a temperate or cold climate. He even anticipates the subject of migration in past geological times by supposing that those forms travelled from the Old World either over some land still unknown, or "more probably" over territory which has long since been submerged.[135]

The mammoth "was certainly the greatest and strongest of all
quadrupeds, but it has disappeared; and if so, how many smaller,
feebler, and less remarkable species must have perished without
leaving us any traces or even hints of their having existed? How
many other species have changed their nature, that is to say,
become perfected or degraded, through great changes in the
distribution of land and ocean; through the cultivation or neglect
of the country which they inhabit; through the long-continued
effects of climatic changes, so that they are no longer the same
animals that they once were. Yet of all living beings after man the
quadrupeds are the ones whose nature is most fixed and form most
constant; birds and fishes vary much more easily; insects still more
again than these; and if we descend to plants, which certainly
cannot be excluded from animated nature, we shall be surprised at
the readiness with which species are seen to vary, and at the ease
with which they change their forms and adopt new natures."[136]

The following passages, debarring the error of deriving all the American from the Old World forms, and the mistake in supposing that the American forms grew smaller than their ancestors in the Old World, certainly smack of the principle of isolation and segregation, and this is Buffon's most important contribution to the theory of descent.

"It is probable, then, that all the animals of the New World are
derived from congeners in the Old, without any deviation from the
ordinary course of nature. We may believe that, having become
separated in the lapse of ages by vast oceans and countries which
they could not traverse, they have gradually been affected by, and
derived impressions from, a climate which has itself been modified
so as to become a new one through the operations of those same
causes which dissociated the individuals of the Old and the New
World from one another; thus in the course of time they have grown
smaller and changed their characters. This, however, should not
prevent our classifying them as different species now, for the
difference is no less real though it dates from the creation.
_Nature, I maintain, is in a state of continual flux and movement.
It is enough for man if he can grasp her as she is in his own time,
and throw but a glance or two upon the past and future, so as to try
and perceive what she may have been in former times and what one day
she may attain to._"[137]

Buffon thus suggests the principle of the struggle for existence to prevent overcrowding, resulting in the maintenance of the balance of nature:

"It may be said that the movement of Nature turns upon two immovable
pivots--one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all
species; the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the
results of that fecundity, and leave throughout time nearly the same
quantity of individuals in every species; ... destruction and
sterility follow closely upon excessive fecundity, and,
independently of the contagion which follows inevitably upon
overcrowding, each species has its own special sources of death and
destruction, which are of themselves sufficient to compensate for
excess in any past generation."[138]

He also adds, "The species the least perfect, the most delicate, the most unwieldy, the least active, the most unarmed, etc., have already disappeared or will disappear."[139]

On one occasion, in writing on the dog, he anticipates Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck in ascribing to the direct cause of modification the inner feelings of the animal modified, change of condition being the indirect cause.[140] He, however, did not suggest the idea of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity, and does not mention the word heredity.

These are all the facts he stated; but though not an observer, Buffon was a broad thinker, and was led from these few data to generalize, as he could well do, from the breadth of his knowledge of geology gained from the works of his predecessors, from Leibnitz to Woodward and Whiston.

"After the rapid glance," he says, "at these variations, which
indicate to us the special changes undergone by each species, there
arises a more important consideration, and the view of which is
broader; it is that of the transformation (_changement_) of the
species themselves; it is that more ancient modification which has
gone on from time immemorial, which seems to have been made in each
family or, if we prefer, in each of the genera in which were
comprised more or less allied species."[141]

In the beginning of his first volume he states "that we can descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter--from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. We will recognize this gradation as the great work of nature; and we will observe it not only as regards size and form, but also in respect of movements and in the successive generations of every species."

"Hence," he continues, "arises the difficulty of arriving at any
perfect system or method in dealing either with nature as a whole or
even with any single one of her subdivisions. The gradations are so
subtle that we are often obliged to make arbitrary divisions. Nature
knows nothing about our classifications, and does not choose to lend
herself to them without reasons. We therefore see a number of
intermediate species and objects which it is very hard to classify,
and which of necessity derange our system, whatever it may be."[142]

This is all true, and was probably felt by Buffon's predecessors, but it does not imply that he thought these forms had descended from one another.

"In thus comparing," he adds, "all the animals, and placing them
each in its proper genus, we shall find that the two hundred species
whose history we have given may be reduced to a quite small number
of families or principal sources from which it is not impossible
that all the others may have issued."[143]

He then establishes, on the one hand, nine species which he regarded as isolated, and, on the other, fifteen principal genera, primitive sources or, as we would say, ancestral forms, from which he derived all the animals (mammals) known to him.

Hence he believed that he could derive the dog, the jackal, the wolf, and the fox from a single one of these four species; yet he remarks, _per contra_, in 1753:

"Although we cannot demonstrate that the production of a species by
modification is a thing impossible to nature, the number of
contrary probabilities is so enormous that, even philosophically, we
can scarcely doubt it; for if any species has been produced by the
modification of another, if the species of ass has been derived from
that of the horse, this could have been done only successively and
by gradual steps: there would have been between the horse and ass a
great number of intermediate animals, the first of which would
gradually differ from the nature of the horse, and the last would
gradually approach that of the ass; and why do we not see to-day the
representatives, the descendants of those intermediate species? Why
are only the two extremes living?" (tome iv., p. 390). "If we once
admit that the ass belongs to the horse family, and that it only
differs from it because it has been modified (_dégénéré_), we may
likewise say that the monkey is of the same family as man, that it
is a modified man, that man and the monkey have had a common origin
like the horse and ass, that each family has had but a single
source, and even that all the animals have come from a single
animal, which in the succession of ages has produced, while
perfecting and modifying itself, all the races of other animals"
(tome iv., p. 382). "If it were known that in the animals there had
been, I do not say several species, but a single one which had been
produced by modification from another species; if it were true that
the ass is only a modified horse, there would be no limit to the
power of nature, and we would not be wrong in supposing that from a
single being she has known how to derive, with time, all the other
organized beings" (_ibid._, p. 382).

The next sentence, however, translated, reads as follows:

"But no. It is certain from revelation that all animals have alike
been favored with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that
the first pair of every species issued fully formed from the hands
of the Creator" (tome iv., p. 383).

In which of these views did Buffon really believe? Yet they appear in the same volume, and not at different periods of his life.

He actually does say in the same volume (iv., p. 358): "It is not impossible that all species may be derivations (_issues_)." In the same volume also (p. 215) he remarks:

"There is in nature a general prototype in each species on which
each individual is modelled, but which seems, in being realized, to
change or become perfected by circumstances; so that, relatively to
certain qualities, there is a singular (_bizarre_) variation in
appearance in the succession of individuals, and at the same time a
constancy in the entire species which appears to be admirable."

And yet we find him saying at the same period of his life, in the previous volume, that species "are the only beings in nature, beings perpetual, as ancient, as permanent as she."[144] A few pages farther on in the same volume of the same work, apparently written at the same time, he is strongly and stoutly anti-evolutional, affirming: "The imprint of each species is a type whose principal features are graven in characters forever ineffaceable and permanent."[145]

In this volume (iv., p. 55) he remarks that the senses, whether in man or in animals, may be greatly developed by exercise.

The impression left on the mind, after reading Buffon, is that even if he threw out these suggestions and then retracted them, from fear of annoyance or even persecution from the bigots of his time, he did not himself always take them seriously, but rather jotted them down as passing thoughts. Certainly he did not present them in the formal, forcible, and scientific way that Erasmus Darwin did. The result is that the tentative views of Buffon, which have to be with much research extracted from the forty-four volumes of his works, would now be regarded as in a degree superficial and valueless. But they appeared thirty-four years before Lamarck's theory, and though not epoch-making, they are such as will render the name of Buffon memorable for all time.

ÉTIENNE GEOFFROY ST. HILAIRE.

Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire was born at Étampes, April 15, 1772. He died in Paris in 1844. He was destined for the church, but his tastes were for a scientific career. His acquaintance with the Abbé Haüy and Daubenton led him to study mineralogy. He was the means of liberating Haüy from a political prison; the Abbé, as the result of the events of August, 1792, being promptly set free at the request of the Academy of Sciences. The young Geoffroy was in his turn aided by the illustrious Haüy, who obtained for him the position of sub-guardian and demonstrator of mineralogy in the Cabinet of Natural History. At the early age of twenty-one years, as we have seen, he was elected professor of zoölogy in the museum, in charge of the department of mammals and birds. He was the means of securing for Cuvier, then of his own age, a position in the museum as professor-adjunct of comparative anatomy. For two years (1795 and 1796) the two youthful savants were inseparable, sharing the same apartments, the same table, the same amusements, the same studies, and their scientific papers were prepared in company and signed in common.

Geoffroy became a member of the great scientific commission sent to Egypt by Napoleon (1789-1802). By his boldness and presence of mind he, with Savigny and the botanist Delille, saved the treasures which at Alexandria had fallen into the hands of the English general in command. In 1808 he was charged by Napoleon with the duty of organizing public instruction in Portugal. Here again, by his address and firmness, he saved the collections and exchanges made there from the hands of the English. When thirty-six years old he was elected a member of the Institute.

In 1818 he began to discuss philosophical anatomy, the doctrine of homologies; he also studied the embryology of the mammals, and was the founder of teratology. It was he who discovered the vestigial teeth of the baleen whale and those of embryo birds, and the bearing of this on the doctrine of descent must have been obvious to him.

As early as 1795, before Lamarck had changed his views as to the stability of species, the young Geoffroy, then twenty-three years old, dared to claim that species may be only "_les diverses dégénérations d'un même type_." These views he did not abandon, nor, on the other hand, did he actively promulgate them. It was not until thirty years later, in his memoir on the anatomy of the gavials, that he began the series of his works bearing on the question of species. In 1831 was held the famous debates between himself and Cuvier in the Academy of Sciences. But the contest was not so much on the causes of the variation of species as on the doctrine of homologies and the unity of organization in the animal kingdom.

In fact, Geoffroy did not adopt the views peculiar to his old friend Lamarck, but was rather a follower of Buffon. His views were preceded by two premises.

The species is only "_fixé sous la raison du maintien de l'état conditionnel de son milieu ambiant_."

It is modified, it changes, if the environment (_milieu ambiant_) varies, and according to the extent (selon la portée) of the variations of the latter.[146]

As the result, among recent or living beings there are no essential differences as regards them--"_c'est le même cours d'événements_," or "_la même marche d'excitation_."[147]

On the other hand, the _monde ambiant_ having undergone more or less considerable change from one geological epoch to another, the atmosphere having even varied in its chemical composition, and the conditions of respiration having been thus modified,[148] the beings then living would differ in structure from their ancestors of ancient times, and would differ from them according "to the degree of the modifying power."[149] Again, he says, "The animals living to-day have been derived by a series of uninterrupted generations from the extinct animals of the antediluvian world."[150] He gave as an example the crocodiles of the present day, which he believed to have descended from the fossil forms. While he admitted the possibility of one type passing into another, separated by characters of more than generic value, he always, according to his son Isidore, rejected the view which made all the living species descend "_d'une espèce antediluvienne primitive_."[151] It will be seen that Geoffroy St. Hilaire's views were chiefly based on palæontological evidence. He was throughout broad and philosophical, and his eloquent demonstration in his _Philosophie anatomique_ of the doctrine of homologies served to prepare the way for modern morphology, and affords one of the foundation stones on which rests the theory of descent. Though temporarily vanquished in the debate with Cuvier, who was a forceful debater and represented the views then prevalent, a later generation acknowledges that he was in the right, and remembers him as one of the founders of evolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[125] Mr. Morley, in his _Rousseau_, gives a startling picture of the hostility of the parliament at the period (1762) when Buffon's works appeared. Not only was Rousseau hunted out of France, and his books burnt by the public executioner, but there was "hardly a single man of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment" (p. 270); among others thus imprisoned was Diderot. At this time (1750-1765) Malesherbes (born 1721, guillotined 1794), one of the "best instructed and most enlightened men of the century," was Directeur de la Libraire. "The process was this: a book was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report the director gave or refused permission to print or required alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the parliament, or else a lettre-de-cachet might send the author to the Bastille" (Morley's _Rousseau_, p. 266).

[126] _Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière._ 1st edition. Imprimerie royale. Paris: 1749-1804, 44 vols. 4to. Tome iv., p. 357. This is the best of all the editions of Buffon, says Flourens, from whose _Histoire des Travaux et des Idées de Buffon_, 1st edition (Paris, 1844), we take some of the quotations and references, which, however, we have verified. We have also quoted some passages from Buffon translated by Butler in his "Evolution, Old and New" (London, 1879).

[127] _L. c._, tome iv., p. 384 (1753). This is the first volume on the animals below man.

[128] Tome xi., p. 369 (1764).

[129] Tome xii., p. 3 (1764).

[130] Tome v., p. 59 (1755).

[131] Tome xiii., p. vii. (1765).

[132] Osborn adopts, without warrant we think, Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's notion, stating that he "shows clearly that his opinions marked three periods." The writings of Isidore, the son of Étienne Geoffroy, have not the vigor, exactness, or depth of those of his father.

[133] Tome xiv., p. 326 (1766).

[134] Tome vi., pp. 59-60 (1756).

[135] Butler, _l. c._, pp. 145-146.

[136] Tome ix., p. 127, 1761 (_ex_ Butler).

[137] Tome ix., p. 127, 1761 (_ex_ Butler).

[138] Tome vi., p. 252, 1756 (quoted from Butler, _l. c._, pp. 123-126).

[139] Quoted from Osborn, who takes it from De Lanessan.

[140] Butler, _l. c._, p. 122 (from Buffon, tome v., 1755).

[141] Tome xiv., p. 335 (1766).

[142] Tome i., p. 13.

[143] Tome xiv., p. 358.

[144] Tome xiii., p. i.

[145] Tome xiii., p. ix.

[146] _Études progressives d'un Naturaliste_, etc., 1835, p. 107.

[147] _Ibid._

[148] _Sur l'Influence du Monde ambiant pour modifier les Formes animaux (Mémoires Acad. Sciences_, xii., 1833, pp. 63, 75).

[149] _Recherches sur l'Organisation des Gavials (Mémoires du Muséum d'Histoire naturelle_), xii., p. 97 (1825).

[150] _Sur l'Influence du Monde ambiant_, p. 74.

[151] _Dictionnaire de la Conversation_, xxxi., p. 487, 1836 (quoted by I. Geoffroy St. Hilaire); _Histoire nat. gén. des Règnes organiques_, ii., 2^e partie; also _Résumé_, p. 30 (1859).