Chapter VI: Part 6

It is on this margin that the fulcrum is to be found, whereby we obtain the little purchase over our structure, that enables us to achieve great results if we use it steadily, with judgment, and with neither too little effort nor too much. It is by employing this that those who have a fancy to move their ears or toes without moving other organs learn to do so. There is a man at the Agricultural Hall now {153a} playing the violin with his toes, and playing it, as I am told, sufficiently well. The eye of the sailor, the wrist of the conjuror, the toe of the professional medium, are all found capable of development to an astonishing degree, even in a single lifetime; but in every case success has been attained by the simple process of making the best of whatever power a man has had at any given time, and by being on the look-out to take advantage of accident, and even of misfortune. If a man would learn to paint, he must not theorise concerning art, nor think much what he would do beforehand, but he must do _something_--whatever under the circumstances will come handiest and easiest to him; and he must do that something as well as he can. This will presently open the door for something else, and a way will show itself which no conceivable amount of searching would have discovered, but which yet could never have been discovered by sitting still and taking no pains at all. "Dans l'animal," says Buffon, "il y a moins de jugement que de sentiment." {153b}

It may appear as though this were blowing hot and cold with the same breath, inasmuch as I am insisting that important modifications of structure have been always purposive; and at the same time am denying that the creature modified has had any far-seeing purpose in the greater part of all those actions which have at length modified both structure and instinct. Thus I say that a bird learns to swim without having any purpose of learning to swim before it set itself to make those movements which have resulted in its being able to do so. At the same time I maintain that it has only learned to swim by trying to swim, and this involves the very purpose which I have just denied. The reconciliation of these two apparently irreconcilable contentions must be found in the consideration that the bird was not the less trying to swim, merely because it did not know the name we have chosen to give to the art which it was trying to master, nor yet how great were the resources of that art. A person, who knew all about swimming, if from some bank he could watch our supposed bird's first attempt to scramble over a short space of deep water, would at once declare that the bird was trying to swim--if not actually swimming. Provided then that there is a very little perception of, and prescience concerning, the means whereby the next desired end may be attained, it matters not how little in advance that end may be of present desire or faculties; it is still reached through purpose, and must be called purposive. Again, no matter how many of these small steps be taken, nor how absolute was the want of purpose or prescience concerning any but the one being actually taken at any given moment, this does not bar the result from having been arrived at through design and purpose. If each one of the small steps is purposive the result is purposive, though there was never purpose extended over more than one, two, or perhaps at most three steps at a time.

Returning to the art of painting for an example, are we to say that the proficiency which such a student as was supposed above will certainly attain, is not due to design, merely because it was not until he had already become three parts excellent that he knew the full purport of all that he had been doing? When he began he had but vague notions of what he would do. He had a wish to learn to represent nature, but the line into which he has settled down has probably proved very different from that which he proposed to himself originally. Because he has taken advantage of his accidents, is it, therefore, one whit the less true that his success is the result of his desires and his design? The _Times_ pointed out some time ago that the theory which now associates meteors and comets in the most unmistakable manner, was suggested by one accident, and confirmed by another. But the writer added well that "such accidents happen only to the zealous student of nature's secrets." In the same way the bird that is taking to the habit of swimming, and of making the most of whatever skin it already has between its toes, will have doubtless to thank accidents for no small part of its progress; but they will be such accidents as could never have happened to or been taken advantage of by any creature which was not zealously trying to make the most of itself--and between such accidents as this, and design, the line is hard to draw; for if we go deep enough we shall find that most of our design resolves itself into as it were a shaking of the bag to see what will come out that will suit our purpose, and yet at the same time that most of our shaking of the bag resolves itself into a design that the bag shall contain only such and such things, or thereabouts.

Again, the fact that animals are no longer conscious of design and purpose in much that they do, but act unreflectingly, and as we sometimes say concerning ourselves "automatically" or "mechanically"--that they have no idea whatever of the steps, whereby they have travelled to their present state, and show no sign of doubt about what must have been at one time the subject of all manner of doubts, difficulties, and discussions--that whatever sign of reflection they now exhibit is to be found only in case of some novel feature or difficulty presenting itself; these facts do not bar that the results achieved should be attributed to an inception in reason, design and purpose, no matter how rapidly and as we call it instinctively, the creatures may now act.

For if we look closely at such an invention as the steam engine in its latest and most complicated developments, about which there can be no dispute but that they are achievements of reason, purpose and design, we shall find them present us with examples of all those features the presence of which in the handiwork of animals is too often held to bar reason and purpose from having had any share therein.

Assuredly such men as the Marquis of Worcester and Captain Savery had very imperfect ideas as to the upshot of their own action. The simplest steam engine now in use in England is probably a marvel of ingenuity as compared with the highest development which appeared possible to these two great men, while our newest and most highly complicated engines would seem to them more like living beings than machines. Many, again, of the steps leading to the present development have been due to action which had but little heed of the steam engine, being the inventions of attendants whose desire was to save themselves the trouble of turning this or that cock, and who were indifferent to any other end than their own immediate convenience. No step in fact along the whole route was ever taken with much perception of what would be the next step after the one being taken at any given moment.

Nor do we find that an engine made after any old and well-known pattern is now made with much more consciousness of design than we can suppose a bird's nest to be built with. The greater number of the parts of any such engine, are made by the gross as it were like screw and nuts, which are turned out by machinery and in respect of which the labour of design is now no more felt than is the design of him who first invented the wheel. It is only when circumstances require any modification in the article to be manufactured that thought and design will come into play again; but I take it few will deny that if circumstances compel a bird either to give up a nest three-parts built altogether, or to make some trifling deviation from its ordinary practice, it will in nine cases out of ten make such deviation as shall show that it had thought the matter over, and had on the whole concluded to take such and such a course, that is to say, that it had reasoned and had acted with such purpose as its reason had dictated.

And I imagine that this is the utmost that any one can claim even for man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without rendering the whole performance abortive, is any argument against that action having been an achievement of design and reason in respect of each one of the steps that have led to it; and if in respect of each one of the steps then as regards the entire action; for we see our own most reasoned actions become no less easy, unerring, automatic, and unconscious, than the actions which we call instinctive when they have been repeated a sufficient number of times.

* * * * *

If the foregoing be granted, and it be admitted that the unconsciousness and seeming automatism with which any action may be performed is no bar to its having a foundation in memory, reason, and at one time consciously recognised effort--and this I believe to be the chief addition which I have ventured to make to the theory of Buffon and Dr. Erasmus Darwin--then the wideness of the difference between the Darwinism of eighty years ago and the Darwinism of to-day becomes immediately apparent, and it also becomes apparent, how important and interesting is the issue which is raised between them.

According to the older Darwinism the lungs are just as purposive as the corkscrew. They, no less than the corkscrew, are a piece of mechanism designed and gradually improved upon and perfected by an intelligent creature for the gratification of its own needs. True there are many important differences between mechanism which is part of the body, and mechanism which is no such part, but the differences are such as do not affect the fact that in each case the result, whether, for example, lungs or corkscrew, is due to desire, invention, and design.

And now I will ask one more question, which may seem, perhaps, to have but little importance, but which I find personally interesting. I have been told by a reviewer, of whom upon the whole I have little reason to complain, that the theory I put forward in "Life and Habit," and which I am now again insisting on, is pessimism--pure and simple. I have a very vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist? He who sees love of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and every quality to which success has assigned the name of "worth" as having drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past time, or he who sees nothing in the world of nature but a chapter of accidents and of forces interacting blindly?

BUFFON--MEMOIR. (CHAPTER VIII. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)

Buffon, says M. Flourens, was born at Montbar, on the 7th of September 1707; he died in Paris, at the Jardin du Roi, on the 16th of April 1788, aged 81 years. More than fifty of these years, as he used himself to say, he had passed at his writing-desk. His father was a councillor of the parliament of Burgundy. His mother was celebrated for her wit, and Buffon cherished her memory.

He studied at Dijon with much _eclat_, and shortly after leaving became accidentally acquainted with the Duke of Kingston, a young Englishman of his own age, who was travelling abroad with a tutor. The three travelled together in France and Italy, and Buffon then passed some months in England.

Returning to France, he translated Hales's Vegetable Statics and Newton's Treatise on Fluxions. He refers to several English writers on natural history in the course of his work, but I see he repeated spells the English name Willoughby, "Willulghby." He was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi in 1739, and from thenceforth devoted himself to science.

In 1752 Buffon married Mdlle de Saint Belin, whose beauty and charm of manner were extolled by all her contemporaries. One son was born to him, who entered the army, became a colonel, and I grieve to say, was guillotined at the age of twenty-nine, a few days only before the extinction of the Reign of Terror.

Of this youth, who inherited the personal comeliness and ability of his father, little is recorded except the following story. Having fallen into the water and been nearly drowned when he was about twelve years old, he was afterwards accused of having been afraid: "I was so little afraid," he answered, "that though I had been offered the hundred years which my grandfather lived, I would have died then and there, if I could have added one year to the life of my father;" then thinking for a minute, a flush suffused his face and he added, "but I should petition for one quarter of an hour in which to exult over the thought of what I was about to do."

On the scaffold he showed much composure, smiling half proudly, half reproachfully, yet wholly kindly upon the crowd in front of him. "Citoyens," he said, "Je me nomine Buffon," and laid his head upon the block.

The noblest outcome of the old and decaying order, overwhelmed in the most hateful birth frenzy of the new. So in those cataclysms and revolutions which take place in our own bodies during their development, when we seem studying in order to become fishes and suddenly make, as it were, different arrangements and resolve on becoming men--so, doubtless, many good cells must go, and their united death cry comes up, it may be, in the pain which an infant feels on teething. But to return. The man who could be father of such a son, and who could retain that son's affection, as it is well known that Buffon retained it, may not perhaps always be strictly accurate, but it will be as well to pay attention to whatever he may think fit to tell us. These are the only people whom it is worth while to look to and study from.

"Glory," said Buffon, after speaking of the hours during which he had laboured, "glory comes always after labour if she can--_and she generally can_." But in his case she could not well help herself. "He was conspicuous," says M. Flourens, "for elevation and force of character, for a love of greatness and true magnificence in all he did. His great wealth, his handsome person, and graceful manners seemed in correspondence with the splendour of his genius, so that of all the gifts which Fortune has in it her power to bestow she had denied him nothing."

Many of his epigrammatic sayings have passed into proverbs: for example, that "genius is but a supreme capacity for taking pains." Another and still more celebrated passage shall be given in its entirety and with its original setting.

"Style," says Buffon, "is the only passport to posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter that will ensure immortality. Works that can claim all this will yet die if they are conversant about trivial objects only, or written without taste, genius, and true nobility of mind; for range of information, knowledge of details, novelty of discovery are of a volatile essence and fly off readily into other hands that know better how to treat them. The matter is foreign to the man, and is not of him; the manner is the man himself." {162}

"Le style, c'est l'homme memo." Elsewhere he tells us what true style is, but I quote from memory and cannot be sure of the passage. "Le style," he says "est comme le bonheur; il vient de la douceur de l'ame."

Is it possible not to think of the following?--

"But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away . . . and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." {163}

BUFFON'S METHOD--THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK. (CHAPTER IX. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)

Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the possibility of method at all. "The true method," he writes, "is the complete description and exact history of each particular object," {164a} and later on he asks, "is it not more simple, more natural and more true to call an ass an ass, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing why, that an ass is a horse, and a cat a lynx?" {164b}

He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can be founded on the nature of things themselves. He concludes that one who could see living forms as a whole and without preconceived opinions, would classify animals according to the relations in which he found himself standing towards them:--

"Those which he finds most necessary and useful to him will occupy the
first rank; thus he will give the precedence among the lower animals
to the dog and the horse; he will next concern himself with those
which without being domesticated, nevertheless occupy the same country
and climate as himself, as for example stags, hares, and all wild
animals; nor will it be till after he has familiarised himself with
all these that curiosity will lead him to inquire what inhabitants
there may be in foreign climates, such as elephants, dromedaries, &c.
The same will hold good for fishes, birds, insects, shells, and for
all nature's other productions; he will study them in proportion to
the profit which he can draw from them; he will consider them in that
order in which they enter into his daily life; he will arrange them in
his head according to this order, which is in fact that in which he
has become acquainted with them, and in which it concerns him to think
about them, This order--the most natural of all--is the one which I
have thought it well to follow in this volume. My classification has
no more mystery in it than the reader has just seen . . . it is
preferable to the most profound and ingenious that can be conceived,
for there is none of all the classifications which ever have been made
or ever can be, which has not more of an arbitrary character than this
has. Take it for all in all," he concludes, "it is more easy, more
agreeable, and more useful, to consider things in their relation to
ourselves than from any other standpoint." {165}

"Has it not a better effect not only in a treatise on natural history,
but in a picture or any work of art to arrange objects in the order
and place in which they are commonly found, than to force them into
association in virtue of some theory of our own? Is it not better to
let the dog which has toes, come after the horse which has a single
hoof, in the same way as we see him follow the horse in daily life,
than to follow up the horse by the zebra, an animal which is little
known to us, and which has no other connection with the horse than the
fact that it has a single hoof?" {166a}

Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more connection than this? The writer whom we shall presently find {166b} declining to admit any essential difference between the skeletons of man and of the horse, can here see no resemblance between the zebra and the horse, except that they each have a single hoof. Is he to be taken at his word?

It is perhaps necessary to tell the reader that Buffon carried the foregoing scheme into practice as nearly as he could in the first fifteen volumes of his Natural History. He begins with man--and then goes on to the horse, the ass, the cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog, &c. One would be glad to know whether he found it always more easy to know in what order of familiarity this or that animal would stand to the majority of his readers than other classifiers have found it to know whether an individual more resembles one species or another; probably he never gave the matter a thought after he had gone through the first dozen most familiar animals, but settled generally down into a classification which becomes more and more specific--as when he treats of the apes and monkeys--till he reaches the birds, when he openly abandons his original idea, in deference, as he says, to the opinion of "le peuple des naturalistes."

Perhaps the key to this piece of apparent extravagance is to be found in the word "mysterieuse." {166c} Buffon wished to raise a standing protest against mystery mongering. Or perhaps more probably, he wished at once to turn to animals under domestication, so as to insist early on the main object of his work--the plasticity of animal forms.

I am inclined to think that a vein of irony pervades the whole or much the greater part of Buffon's work, and that he intended to convey one meaning to one set of readers, and another to another; indeed, it is often impossible to believe that he is not writing between his lines for the discerning, what the undiscerning were not intended to see. It must be remembered that his Natural History has two sides,--a scientific and a popular one. May we not imagine that Buffon would be unwilling to debar himself from speaking to those who could understand him, and yet would wish like Handel and Shakespeare to address the many, as well as the few? But the only manner in which these seemingly irreconcilable ends could be attained, would be by the use of language which should be self-adjusting to the capacity of the reader. So keen an observer can hardly have been blind to the signs of the times which were already close at hand. Free- thinker though he was, he was also a powerful member of the aristocracy, and little likely to demean himself--for so he would doubtless hold it--by playing the part of Voltaire or Rousseau. He would help those who could see to see still further, but he would not dazzle eyes that were yet imperfect with a light brighter than they could stand. He would therefore impose upon people, as much as he thought was for their good; but, on the other hand, he would not allow inferior men to mystify them.

"In the private character of Buffon," says Sir William Jardine in a characteristic passage, "we regret there is not much to praise; his disposition was kind and benevolent, and he was generally beloved by his inferiors, followers, and dependants, which were numerous over his extensive property; he was strictly honourable, and was an affectionate parent. In early youth he had entered into the pleasures and dissipations of life, and licentious habits seem to have been retained to the end. But the great blemish in such a mind was his declared infidelity; it presents one of those exceptions among the persons who have been devoted to the study of nature; and it is not easy to imagine a mind apparently with such powers, scarcely acknowledging a Creator, and when noticed, only by an arraignment for what appeared wanting or defective in His great works. So openly, indeed, was the freedom of his religious opinions expressed, that the indignation of the Sorbonne was provoked. He had to enter into an explanation which he in some way rendered satisfactory; and while he afterwards attended to the outward ordinances of religion, he considered them as a system of faith for the multitude, and regarded those most impolitic who most opposed them." {168}

This is partly correct and partly not. Buffon was a free-thinker, and as I have sufficiently explained, a decided opponent of the doctrine that rudimentary and therefore useless organs were designed by a Creator in order to serve some useful end throughout all time to the creature in which they are found.

He was not, surely, to hide the magnificent conceptions which he had been the first to grasp, from those who were worthy to receive them; on the other hand he would not tell the uninstructed what they would interpret as a licence to do whatever they pleased, inasmuch as there was no God. What he did was to point so irresistibly in the right direction, that a reader of any intelligence should be in no doubt as to the road he ought to take, and then to contradict himself so flatly as to reassure those who would be shocked by a truth for which they were not yet ready. If I am right in the view which I have taken of Buffon's work, it is not easy to see how he could have formed a finer scheme, nor have carried it out more finely.

I should, however, warn the reader to be on his guard against accepting my view too hastily. So far as I know I stand alone in taking it. Neither Dr. Darwin, nor Flourens, nor Isidore Geoffroy, nor Mr. Charles Darwin see any subrisive humour in Buffon's pages; but it must be remembered that Flourens was a strong opponent of mutability, and probably paid but little heed to what Buffon said on this question; Isidore Geoffroy is not a safe guide, few men indeed less so. Mr. Charles Darwin seems to have adopted the one half of Isidore Geoffrey's conclusions without verifying either; and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who has no small share of a very pleasant conscious humour, yet sometimes rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward tells us, that he "illustrated this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty administering sustenance to her infant." Buffon could not have done anything like this.

Buffon never, then, "arraigned the Creator for what was wanting or defective in His works;" on the contrary, whenever he was led up by an irresistible chain of reasoning to conclusions which should make men recast their ideas concerning the Deity, he invariably retreats under cover of an appeal to revelation. Naturally enough, the Sorbonne objected to an artifice which even Buffon could not conceal completely. They did not like being undermined; like Buffon himself, they preferred imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. Buffon made his peace with the Sorbonne immediately, and, perhaps, from that time forward, contradicted himself a little more impudently than heretofore.

It is probably for the reasons above suggested that Buffon did not propound a connected scheme of evolution or descent with modification, but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the animal more familiarly--and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half chapter when he does so--he writes no more about evolution, but gives an admirable description, which no one can fail to enjoy, and which I cannot think is nearly so inaccurate as is commonly supposed. These descriptions are the parts which Buffon intended for the general reader, expecting, doubtless, and desiring that such a reader should skip the dry parts he had been addressing to the more studious. It is true the descriptions are written _ad captandum_, as are all great works, but they succeed in captivating, having been composed with all the pains a man of genius and of great perseverance could bestow upon them. If I am not mistaken, he looked to these parts of his work to keep the whole alive till the time should come when the philosophical side of his writings should be understood and appreciated.

Thus the goat breeds with the sheep, and may therefore serve as the text for a dissertation on hybridism, which is accordingly given in the preface to this animal. The presence of rudimentary organs under a pig's hoof suggests an attack upon the doctrine of final causes in so far as it is pretended that every part of every animal or plant was specially designed with a view to the wants of the animal or plant itself, once and forever throughout all time. The dog with his great variety of breeds gives an opportunity for an article on the formation of breeds and sub- breeds by man's artificial selection. The cat is not honoured with any philosophical reflection, and comes in for nothing but abuse. The hare suggests the rabbit, and the rabbit is a rapid breeder, although the hare is an unusually slow one; but this is near enough, so the hare shall serve us for the theme of a discourse on the geometrical ratio of increase and the balance of power which may be observed in nature. When we come to the carnivora, additional reflections follow upon the necessity for death, and even for violent death; this leads to the question whether the creatures that are killed suffer pain; here, then, will be the proper place for considering the sensations of animals generally.

Perhaps the most pregnant passage concerning evolution is to be found in the preface to the ass, which is so near the beginning of the work as to be only the second animal of which Buffon treats after having described man himself. It points strongly in the direction of his having believed all animal forms to have been descended from one single common ancestral type. Buffon did not probably choose to take his very first opportunity in order to insist upon matter that should point in this direction; but the considerations were too important to be deferred long, and are accordingly put forward under cover of the ass, his second animal.

When we consider the force with which Buffon's conclusion is led up to; the obviousness of the conclusion itself when the premises are once admitted; the impossibility that such a conclusion should be again lost sight of if the reasonableness of its being drawn had been once admitted; the position in his scheme which is assigned to it by its propounder; the persistency with which he demonstrates during forty years thereafter that the premises, which he has declared should establish the conclusion in question, are indisputable;--when we consider, too, that we are dealing with a 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 Buffon did not in his 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 organised beings,
we shall find that though all these beings have an individuality of
their own, and are distinguished from one another by differences of
which the gradations are infinitely subtle, there exists at the same
time a primitive 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 resemblance. 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 carries
with it irresistibly the idea of a single pattern after which all
would appear to have been conceived. The horse, for example--what can
at first sight seem more unlike mankind? Yet when we compare man and
horse point by point and detail by detail, is not our wonder excited
rather by the points of resemblance than of difference that are to be
found between them? Take the skeleton of a man; bend forward the
bones in the region of the pelvis, shorten the thigh bones, and those
of the leg and arm, lengthen those of the feet and hands, run the
joints together, lengthen the jaws, and shorten the frontal bone,
finally, lengthen the spine, and the skeleton will now be that of a
man no longer, but will have become that of a horse--for it is easy to
imagine that in lengthening the spine and the jaws we shall at the
same time have increased the number of the vertebrae, ribs, and teeth.
It is but in the number of these bones, which may be considered
accessory, and by the lengthening, shortening, or mode of attachment
of others, that the skeleton of the horse differs from that of the
human body. . . . We find ribs in man, in all the quadrupeds, in
birds, in fishes, and we may find traces of them as far down as the
turtle, in which they seem still to be sketched out by means of
furrows that are to be found beneath the shell. Let it be remembered
that the foot of the horse, which seems so different from a man's
hand, is, nevertheless, as M. Daubenton has pointed out, composed of
the same bones, and that we have at the end of each of our fingers a
nail corresponding to the hoof of a horse's foot. Judge, then,
whether this hidden resemblance is not more marvellous than any
outward differences--whether this constancy to a single plan of
structure which we may follow from man to the quadrupeds, from the
quadrupeds to the cetacea, from the cetacea to birds, from birds to
reptiles, from reptiles to fishes--in which all such essential parts
as heart, intestines, spine are invariably found--whether, I say, this
does not seem to indicate that the Creator when He made them would use
but a single main idea, though at the same time varying it in every
conceivable way, so that man might admire equally the magnificence of
the execution and the simplicity of the design." {174}

"If we regard the matter thus, not only the ass and the horse, _but
even man himself_, _the apes_, _the quadrupeds_, _and all animals
might be regarded but as forming members of one and the same family_.
But are we to conclude that within this vast family which the Creator
has called into existence out of nothing, there are other and smaller
families, projected as it were by Nature, and brought forth by her in
the natural course of events and after a long time, of which some
contain but two members, as the ass and the horse, others many
members, as the weasel, martin, stoat, ferret, &c., and that on the
same principle there are families of vegetables, containing ten,
twenty, or thirty plants, as the case may be? If such families had
any real existence they could have been formed only by crossing, by
the accumulation of successive variations (_variation successive_),
and by degeneration from an original type; but if we once admit that
there are families of plants and animals, so that the ass may be of
the family of the horse, and that the one may only differ from the
other through degeneration from a common ancestor, we might be driven
to admit that the ape is of the family of man, that he is but a
degenerate man, and that he and man have had a common ancestor, even
as the ass and horse have had. It would follow then that every
family, whether animal or vegetable, had sprung from a single stock,
which after a succession of generations had become higher in the case
of some of its descendants and lower in that of others."

What inference could be more aptly drawn? But it was not one which Buffon was going to put before the general public. He had said enough for the discerning, and continues with what is intended to make the conclusions they should draw even plainer to them, while it conceals them still more carefully from the general reader.

"The naturalists who are so ready to establish families among animals and vegetables, do not seem to have sufficiently considered the consequences which should follow from their premises, for these would limit direct creation to as small a number of forms as any one might think fit (reduisoient le produit immediat de la creation, aun nombre d'individus aussi petit que l'on voudroit). _For if it were once shown that we had right grounds for establishing these families_; _if the point were once gained that among animals and vegetables there had been_, _I do not say several species_, _but even a single one_, _which had been produced in the course of direct descent from another species_; _if for example it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse_--_then there is no further limit to be set to the power of nature_, _and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type_ (_et l'on n'auroit pas tort de supposer_, _que d'un seul etre elle a su tirer avec le temps tous les autres etres organises_)."

Buffon now felt that he had sailed as near the wind as was desirable. His next sentence is as follows:--

"But no! It is certain _from revelation_ that all animals have alike been favoured with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that the first pair of every species issued full formed from the hands of the Creator." {176}

This might be taken as _bona fide_, if it had been written by Bonnet, but it is impossible to accept it from Buffon. It is only those who judge him at second hand, or by isolated passages, who can hold that he failed to see the consequences of his own premises. No one could have seen more clearly, nor have said more lucidly, what should suffice to show a sympathetic reader the conclusion he ought to come to. Even when ironical, his irony is not the ill-natured irony of one who is merely amusing himself at other people's expense, but the serious and legitimate irony of one who must either limit the circle of those to whom he appeals, or must know how to make the same language appeal differently to the different capacities of his readers, and who trusts to the good sense of the discerning to understand the difficulty of his position and make due allowance for it.

The compromise which he thought fit to put before the public was that "Each species has a type of which the principal features are engraved in indelible and eternally permanent characters, while all accessory touches vary." {177a} It would be satisfactory to know where an accessory touch is supposed to begin and end.

And again:--

"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.

EXTRACTS FROM UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.

RECAPITULATION AND STATEMENT OF AN OBJECTION. (CHAPTER X. OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.) {181a}

The true theory of unconscious action is that of Professor Hering, from whose lecture {181b} it is no strained conclusion to gather that he holds the action of all living beings, from the moment of conception to that of fullest development, to be founded in volition and design, though these have been so long lost sight of that the work is now carried on, as it were, departmentally and in due course according to an official routine which can hardly be departed from.

This involves the older "Darwinism" and the theory of Lamarck, according to which the modification of living forms has been effected mainly through the needs of the living forms themselves, which vary with varying conditions--the survival of the fittest (which, as I see Mr. H. B. Baildon has just said, "sometimes comes to mean merely the survival of the survivors" {181c}) being taken as a matter of course. According to this view of evolution, there is a remarkable analogy between the development of living organs, or tools, and that of those organs or tools external to the body which has been so rapid during the last few thousand years.

Animals and plants, according to Professor Hering, are guided throughout their development, and preserve the due order in each step they take, through memory of the course they took on past occasions when in the persons of their ancestors. I am afraid I have already too often said that if this memory remains for long periods together latent and without effect, it is because the vibrations of the molecular substance of the body which are its supposed explanation are during these periods too feeble to generate action, until they are augmented in force through an accession of similar vibrations issuing from exterior objects; or, in other words, until recollection is stimulated by a return of the associated ideas. On this the internal agitation becomes so much enhanced, that equilibrium is visibly disturbed, and the action ensues which is proper to the vibrations of the particular substance under the particular conditions. This, at least, is what I suppose Professor Hering to intend.

Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and confining ourselves to the fact of memory only, a caterpillar on being just hatched is supposed, according to this theory, to lose its memory of the time it was in the egg, and to be stimulated by an intense but unconscious recollection of the action taken by its ancestors when they were first hatched. It is guided in the course it takes by the experience it can thus command. Each step it takes recalls a new recollection, and thus it goes through a development as a performer performs a piece of music, each bar leading his recollection to the bar that should next follow.

In Life and Habit will be found examples of the manner in which this view solves a number of difficulties for the explanation of which the leading men of science express themselves at a loss. The following from Professor Huxley's recent work upon the crayfish may serve for an example. Professor Huxley writes:--

"It is a widely received notion that the energies of living matter
have a tendency to decline and finally disappear, and that the death
of the body as a whole is a necessary correlate of its life. That all
living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it
would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that
they needs must do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or later
must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts,
does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually renewed
and repaired; and though it is true that individual components of the
body are constantly dying, yet their places are taken by vigorous
successors. A city remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of
its inhabitants; and such an organism as a crayfish is only a
corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially independent
individualities."--_The Crayfish_, p. 127.

Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so Professor Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. "The _city_," he says, "remains." Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for ever.

I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet bring forward in support of Professor Hering's theory; it now remains for me to meet the most troublesome objection to it that I have been able to think of--an objection which I had before me when I wrote Life and Habit, but which then as now I believe to be unsound. Seeing, however, that a plausible case can be made out for it, I will state it and refute it here. When I say refute it, I do not mean that I shall have done with it--for it is plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations between the so- called organic and inorganic worlds--but that I will refute the supposition that it any way militates against Professor Hering's theory.