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Updated: June 23, 2025
There have indeed been most illustrious exceptions; some men protected by their greatness of mind, some by their religious profession, some by the fear of public opinion; but I suppose the run of experimentalists, external to the Catholic Church, have more or less inherited the positive or negative unbelief of Laplace, Buffon, Franklin, Priestley, Cuvier, and Humboldt.
In consequence of this they make but short journeys ten to fifteen miles although they will travel for a long time, allowing them a day's rest out of every five or six. Like the camels of the East, they can go days without water, and Buffon knew one that went eighteen months without it! but Buffon is very poor authority.
But if you flatter the exterior man with your hand, the Homo duplex, the interior man, to use an expression of Buffon, immediately rouses himself and rends you with his keen points of contact. This description of a special class of human creatures, which we hope you will not run up against during your earthly journey, presents a picture of what your wife may be to you.
Helvétius and D'Holbach plunged boldly into ethics and metaphysics; while, a little apart, in learned repose, Buffon advanced the purest interests of science by his researches in Natural History. As every year passed there were new accessions to this great array of writers, who waged their war against ignorance and prejudice with an ever-increasing fury. A war indeed it was.
The Jesuits were not allowed to retain a monopoly of persecuting zeal, and the Jansenists refused to be left behind in the race of hypocritical intrigue. The bishop of Auxerre, who belonged to this party, followed his brother prelate of Paris in a more direct attack, in which he included not only the Encyclopædia, but Montesquieu and Buffon. De Prades took to flight.
"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? Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more connection than this? Is he to be taken at his word?
If Lamarck might write the "Philosophie Zoologique" without, so far as I remember, one word of reference to Buffon, and without being complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write the "Origin of Species" without more than a passing allusion to Lamarck? Mr.
"Lamarck introduced the conception of the action of an animal on itself as a factor in producing modification." Lamarck did nothing of the kind. It was Buffon and Dr. Darwin who introduced this, but more especially Dr. Darwin.
To men of letters who could by no possibility be his rivals, he was, if they behaved well to him, not merely just, not merely courteous, but often a hearty friend and a munificent benefactor. But to every writer who rose to a celebrity approaching his own, he became either a disguised or an avowed enemy. He slyly depreciated Montesquieu and Buffon.
Buffon asserted that the animals of America were smaller than those of Europe. Jefferson flew to the rescue of the animals, and certainly seems to have the best of the argument. Buffon said, that the Indian was cold in love, cruel in war, and mean in intellect. Had Jefferson been a descendant of Pocahontas, he could not have been more zealous in behalf of the Indian.
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