Nevertheless Buffon’s life of pleasure did not occupy all his energies. He possessed, as Voltaire said, “l’âme d’un sage dans le corps d’un athlête,” and while in Paris he wrote and translated various scientific works, was elected a member of the Academy of Science, and in 1739 was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi and of the Royal Museum.
The permanent value to Anthropology of the work of these two men lies in the fact that they both “saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” But they produced results not only distinct, but, in some respects, antagonistic. Buffon, as Topinard says, did not classify, he described; and the value of his work has been very differently appraised. Cuvier had small opinion of it. Camper and Saint-Hilaire considered the author the greatest naturalist of modern times, the French Aristotle. Topinard (1885, p. 33) thus describes the opinion of the public: “Le public, lui, n’hésita pas; dans l’Histoire naturelle des animaux il sentit un souffle nouveau, vit un pressentiment de l’avenir. La libre pensée était dans l’air, 89 approchait; l’œuvre de Buffon, comme l’Encyclopédie, Voltaire, Rousseau et Bougainville, contribua à la Révolution française.”
The genius of Linnæus lay in classification. Order and method were with him a passion. In his Systema Naturæ he fixed the place of Man in Nature, arranging Homo sapiens as a distinct species in the order Primates,[[14]] together with the apes, the lemurs, and the bats. He went further and classified the varieties of man, distinguishing them by skin colour and other characters into four groups—a classification which holds an honourable place at the present day.
[14]. The tenth edition, 1758, is the first in which the order Primates occurs. Earlier editions have the order Anthropomorpha. See Bendyshe, p. 424.
All this was abominable in the eyes of Buffon. “Une vérité humiliante pour l’homme, c’est qu’il doit se ranger lui-même dans la classe des animaux”; and in another place he exclaims: “Les genres, les ordres, les classes, n’existent que dans notre imagination.... Ce ne sont que des idées de convention.... Il n’y a que des individus!” And again: “La nature ne connait pas nos definitions; elle n’a jamais rangé ses ouvrages par tas, ni les êtres par genres.”
Nevertheless both rendered incalculable service to the science. Linnæus “found biology a chaos and left it a cosmos.” “L’anthropologie,” says Flourens, “surgit d’une grande pensée de Buffon; jusqu-là l’homme n’avait été étudié que comme individu, Buffon est le premier qui l’ait envisagé comme espèce.”
But Buffon was no believer in the permanent stability of species. “Nature is far from subjecting herself to final causes in the formation of her creatures.” He went so far as to make a carefully veiled hint (the Sorbonne having eyes on him) of a possible common ancestor for horse and ass, and of ape and man. At least, he says, so one should infer from their general resemblance; but, since the Bible affirms the contrary, “of course the thing cannot be.”[[15]] In 1751 the old naturalist was constrained by the Sorbonne to recant his geological heresies in these words: “I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the Creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact.”
[15]. Quoted from Clodd’s Pioneers of Evolution, 1897, p. 101.
J. F. Blumenbach