n 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."[45]

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 license 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, as will appear presently; Mr.
Charles Darwin seems to have adopted the one half of Isidore Geoffroy'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, as we
shall see later on, that he "illustrated this familiar object with a
picture of Maternal Beauty ad