Buffo

“ I have frequently examined them, and from the female organ being nearly in the middle of the belly there is some reason to conclude as M. de Buffon has done; however, when inclined to admit the male, I have seen the female bend her two fore legs upon the root of a tree, lowering, at the same time, her head and neck, and keeping her hind legs erect, which gave the male an opportunity of acting in the same manner as other quadrupeds. They never copulate but in a state of freedom. The males are very furious in the rutting season, and it is very dangerous to go near them ”

“ If, on the one hand, it occurred to them this man was an animal, on the other the animal was a man, and Buffon did not happen to be there at the time to assign him officially a place in the former kingdom. ”

“ The style of Buffon, viewed as an elaborate work of art, and without regard to the great object of style, that of conveying thoughts in the clearest and simplest manner, is captivating from its sustained harmony and occasional grandeur. ”

“ So Buffon did not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plants were descended one from the other with slight modifications; that would have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness to him in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned or silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred strong and he is one weak unit! ”

“ Layard himself in his ‘Monuments of Nineveh,’ will always be regarded as one of the most charming and unaffected records which we possess of individual enterprise, industry, and energy.
The career of the Comte de Buffon presents another remarkable illustration of the power of patient industry as well as of his own saying, that “Genius is patience.” Notwithstanding the great results achieved by him in natural history, Buffon, when a youth, was regarded as of mediocre talents. ”

“ Such is the theory of the Count de Buffon, a gentleman of great ingenuity, taste and erudition; whose works, so long as he confined himself to facts and reasoning, have been universally admired; but whose theories have been as much ridiculed by others as he ridiculed those of Burnet and Whiston. Soon after the publication of this theory, Buffon was summoned before the Faculty of Theology at Paris, and there informed that fourteen propositions in his works were reprehensible and contrary to the creed of the church. ”

“ Employed in houses, they can wait at table, sweep rooms, brush clothes, clean boots, handle a knife, fork, and spoon properly, and even drink wine,... doing everything as well as the best servant that ever walked upon two legs. Buffon possessed one of these apes, who served him for a long time as a faithful and zealous servant. ”

“ Buffon, inclining strongly toward the system of atoms, ought also to be much opposed, and yet he has been unable to see that Nature, in general, tends far more toward life than toward death, and that it seems to be seeking to organize bodies as much as is possible. ”

“ An incessant worker. His Natural History in 36 volumes bears witness to the fertility of his mind and his capacity for making science attractive. Buffon lived much in seclusion, and attached himself to no sect or religion. Some of his sentences were attacked by the Sorbonne. Hérault de Sêchelles says that Buffon said: “I have named the Creator, but it is only necessary to take out the word and substitute the power of nature.” Died at Paris 16 April, 1788. ”

“ Buffon has observed, belongs to none of the Monkey tribe of the old Continent: on the other hand, those of the old world possess a cavity or pouch on each side the jaw, which serves as a store-room for provision, and which those of America do not enjoy. Thus the diminished activity in the usefulness of the tail is balanced, by an opportunity of laying in store that, which else, might not at all times be so readily acquired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ JOHNSON. 'No, sir; there are none of the French literati now alive, to visit whom I would cross a sea. I can find in Buffon's book all that he can say.' [Footnote: I doubt the justice of my fellow-traveller's remark concerning the French literati, many of whom, I am told, have considerable merit in conversation, as well as in their writings. That of Monsieur de Buffon, in particular, I am well assured is highly instructive and entertaining.]
After supper he said, 'I am sorry that prize-fighting is gone out; every art should be preserved, and the art of defence is surely important. ”

“ And yet these cases of degeneration are far from anything like actual misfortunes, or mishaps of nature, as Buffon was so fond of thinking. These creatures have found their adult mode of life more free from competition than any other, and hence their adoption of it. ”

“ Certainly he ordered the sculptor, Pajon, to erect a full-sized statue of Buffon in the garden during his absence, and to put the inflated inscription on it, “His genius equals the majesty of nature.” Buffon resented this, and he wrote to the President de Ruffey: “I thank you for the part you have taken in procuring this statue, which I neither required nor solicited, and which would have done me greater honour if it had been erected after my death. I have always thought that a wise man should rather fear envy then value glory ”

“ Like all the carnaria, a sagacious instinct prompts him to kill in provision for coming as well as for present hunger. This is the reason that Buffon has stigmatized him as “unnecessarily cruel.”
“The bound with which he throws himself upon his prey,” says an English naturalist, “is as wonderful in its extent as it is terrible in its effects.” Pennant justly observes that the distance which it clears in this deadly leap is scarcely credible. Man is a mere puppet in his gripe; and the Indian buffalo is not only borne down by the ferocious beast, but carried off by his enormous strength. ”

“ Each of us has his own language, his familiar expressions; each of us expresses himself in his own way under given circumstances. When Buffon said "the style is the man," he expressed an absolute truth. When some [Pg 137] body talks to us by telephone, without giving his name, we say, without a shade of hesitation, "It is So-and-so. ”

“ Without our arithmetic we should not, according to Buffon, know that we were old. “Animals,” he says, “do not know it; it is only by our arithmetic that we judge otherwise.”
Buffon having settled on his estate at Montbard, in Burgundy, there pursued his studies with such regularity that the history of one day seems to have been that of all the others through a period of fifty years. After he was dressed, he dictated letters, and regulated his domestic affairs; and at six o’clock he retired to his studies in a pavilion in his garden, about a furlong from the house. ”

“ Cuvier in his memoir of Pennant, written about 1823 for the ‘Biographie Universelle,’ says that Buffon profited by Pennant's ‘History of Quadrupeds,’ 1781, though in the third edition Pennant himself has drawn on Buffon. He describes the work as ‘encore indispensable,’ and praises the ‘Arctic Zoology’ as valuable to naturalists. ”

“ He may even grow morbidly sensitive, like Buffon, who became so impressed with the delicacy and mystery of the human organization, that he was afraid to stoop even to pick up his own pen, when dropped, but called a servant to restore it. ”

“ Indeed, our greatest naturalists assure us, that this animal is far before the human species in every ennobling quality. Buffon makes man a very devil compared with the dog; and had he come directly to the point, I presume he would have told us that the dog is one link above man in the great chain from the fossil to the angel. “Without the dog,” says Buffon, “how could man have been able to tame and reduce other animals into slavery? ”

“ Buffon does not seem to have been troubled with the problem which so engrosses our modern naturalists—how the vegetable and animal kingdoms were developed into their present condition but he was greatly exercised by an equally difficult problem, which seems to have been lost sight of in the present controversy, and which is just as obscure to-day as it was in Buffon's time, at the close of the last century, and that is, Why species are so persistent in Nature; why the acorn always grows into the oak, and why every creature always produces of its kind. ”

“ Pleasure and indolence had their attractions;—but they never held him for many hours from his favourite pursuits. Buffon spent the greater part of his time at Montbar, where, during some years, his friend Daubenton also resided. It was here that Buffon composed nearly the whole of his works. Many interesting details have been preserved of his habits of life, and his mode of composition. He was, like all men who have accomplished great literary undertakings, a severe economist of his time. The employment of every day was fixed with the greatest exactness. ”

“ Thanks to the universal renown which he had acquired both in science and in literature, Buffon maintained with the men who succeeded one another in office relations which enabled him to do almost anything he liked at the Royal Garden.” His manner to public men, as Condorcet said, was conciliatory and tactful, and to his subordinates he was modest and unpretending. (Professor G. T. Hamy, Les Derniers Jours du Jardin du Roi, etc., p. 3.) Buffon, after nearly fifty years of service as Intendant, died April 16, 1788. ”

“ Although Buffon has depicted as forcibly as well can be conceived the low position in Nature of the carnivorous tribes, and not a few of the evils arising from human addiction to carnivorousness, yet, by a strange perversion of the facts of comparative physiology, he has chosen to enlist himself amongst the apologists of that degenerate mode of living. But facts are stronger than prejudices, and his very candid admissions, which we shall here quote, speak sufficiently for themselves:—
“Man [says he] knows how to use, as a master, his power over [other] animals. ”

“ Buffon, ever ready with a speculative explanation, maintained that such minute organisms were spontaneously generated, and that they were capable of coalescing into bodies of larger size and more complex structure. Needham supported Buffon's theories by experiments. Taking infusions of meat, corking them, and sealing them with mastic, he subjected them to a heat which he thought intense enough to destroy life; after an interval the microscope revealed an abundance of living things which he affirmed to have been generated from dead matter. ”

“ It may be surmised that they arose from aristocratic prejudices of rank. Nor is it impossible but that M. le Comte de Buffon instinctively foresaw, with some repugnance, his approaching confraternity with a man formerly a lapidary; but was not Maury the son of a shoemaker? This very small incident of our literary history seemed doomed to remain in obscurity; chance has, I believe, given me the key to it.
You remember, Gentlemen, that aphorism continually quoted by Buffon, and of which he seemed very proud,—
"Style makes the man." ”

“ Buffon, who may justly be called the father of natural science, with powers of research and gifts of presenting results showing genius of a high order, by his simple statement of truths which are to-day truisms in science, was dragged forth by the leaders of the Reformation, and forced to recant publicly and to print his recantation. ”

“ An able statesman, but in science a practical philosopher, rather than a brilliant discoverer.
255. Bernard Germain Étienne Lacépède, Comte de la Ville sur Illon. Naturalist.
[Born at Agen, in France, 1756. Died at Epinay, in France, 1825. Aged 69.]
When young, in the army; but quitted it for the study of Natural History. The favorite pupil of Buffon, who obtained for him the appointment of Curator to the king, and selected him to continue his Natural History. His works display profound research, and are elegantly written. A courteous and kind-hearted man. ”

“ Of the two, we may find the toad the more interesting animal, as among its kinsfolk are some very remarkable families.
Mr. Bufo is a citizen of the world, except of the severely cold polar regions. He hops through the tropics and the temperate zones, and goes pretty well up into the polar regions; an inoffensive, gentle, humble, useful, and generally utterly silent creature. No person is faultless, and Bufo is not superior to humans in that no evil may be laid to his charge. ”

“ Bufo would almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along their paths. ”

“ Buff’s playfellows next pass in succession, between him and the candle, distorting their features as much as possible—hopping, limping, and performing odd antics, so as to make their shadows very unlike themselves. Buff, who is not blindfolded, must try to guess to whom the shadows belong, and if he guesses correctly, the player whose shadow he recognises takes his place. Buff is allowed only one guess for each person, and must not turn his head either to the right or to the left to see who passes. ”

“ Bufo when, brigand-like, he can stand by the highway of the bees returning laden with wealth of honey and entering their waxen city. He holds his captives for no ransom, he scarcely stays to kill them, but swallows them alive and whole, and digests them later. ”

“ Not far ahead of him and just back of the smouldering ruin he could distinctly see, lighted by the glow, a human form whose progress was so slow as to make it seem almost stationary.
Who was it? Cap'n Buffum was the lad's first thought, but, as he advanced a little farther, he was convinced that the figure was that of a less thick-set person. Whoever it was, the discovery called for instant action. He must get a closer view of the night prowler. ”