But I think I can show that the passages which M. Geoffroy brings forward, to prove that Buffon was in the first instance a supporter of invariability, do not bear him out in the deduction he has endeavoured to draw from them.
"What author," he asks, "has ever pronounced more decidedly than Buffon in favour of the invariability of species? Where can we find a more decided expression of opinion than the following?
"'The different species of animals are separated from one another by a space which Nature cannot overstep.'"
On turning, however, to Buffon himself, I find the passage to stand as follows:—
"Although the different species of animals are separated from one another by a space which Nature cannot overstep—yet some of them approach so nearly to one another in so many respects that there is only room enough left for the getting in of a line of separation between them,"[57] and on the following page he distinctly encourages the idea of the mutability of species in the following passage:—
"In place of regarding the ass as a degenerate horse, there would be more reason in calling the horse a more perfect kind of ass (un âne perfectionné), and the sheep a more delicate kind of goat, that we have tended, perfected, and propagated for our use, and that the more perfect animals in general—especially the domestic animals—draw their origin from some less perfect species of that kind of wild animal which they most resemble. Nature alone not being able to do as much as Nature and man can do in concert with one another."[58]
But Buffon had long ago declared that if the horse and the ass could be considered as being blood relations there was no stopping short of the admission that all animals might also be blood relations—that is to say, descended from common ancestors—and now he tells us that the ass and horse are in all probability descended from common ancestors. Will a reader of any literary experience hold that so laborious, and yet so witty a writer, and one so studious of artistic effect, could ignore the broad lines he had laid down for himself, or forget how what he had said would bear on subsequent passages, and subsequent passages on it? A less painstaking author than Buffon may yet be trusted to remember his own work well enough to avoid such literary bad workmanship as this. If Buffon had seen reason to change his mind he would have said so, and would have contradicted the inference he had originally pronounced to be deducible from an admission of kinship between the ass and the horse. This, it is hardly necessary to say, he never does, though he frequently thinks it well to remind his reader of the fact that the ass and the horse are in all probability closely related. This is bringing two and two together with sufficient closeness for all practical purposes.
Should not M. Geoffroy's question, then, have rather been "Who has ever pronounced more grudgingly, even in an early volume, &c., &c., and who has more completely neutralized whatever concession he might appear to have been making?"
Nor does the only other passage which M. Geoffroy brings forward to prove that Buffon was originally a believer in the fixity of species bear him out much better. It is to be found on the opening page of a brief introduction to the wild animals. M. Geoffroy quotes it thus: "We shall see Nature dictating her laws, so simple yet so unchangeable, and imprinting her own immutable characters upon every species." But M. Geoffroy does not give the passage which, on the same page, admits mutability among domesticated animals, in the case of which he declares we find Nature "rarement perfectionnée, souvent alterée, défigurée;" nor yet does he deem it necessary to show that the context proves that this unchangeableness of wild animals is only relative; and this he should certainly have done, for two pages later on Buffon speaks of the American tigers, lions, and panthers as being "degenerated, if their original nature was cruel and ferocious; or, rather, they have experienced the effect of climate, and under a milder sky have assumed a milder nature, their excesses have become moderated, and by the changes which they have undergone they have become more in conformity with the country they inhabit."[59]