t 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 perfectionnee, souvent alteree, defiguree;" 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]

And again:--

"If we consider each species in the different climates which it
inhabits, we shall find perceptible varieties as regards size and form:
they all derive an impress to a greater or less extent from the climate
in which they live. _These changes are only made slowly and
imperceptibly._ Nature's great workman is Time. He marches ever with an
even pace, and does nothing by leaps and bounds, but by degrees,
gradations, and succession he does all things; and the changes which he
works--at first imperceptible--become little by little perceptible, and
show themselves eventually in results about which there can be no
mistake.

"Nevertheless animals in a free, wild state are perhaps less subject
than any other living beings, man not excepted, to alterations, changes,
and variations of all kinds. Being free to choose their own food and
climate, they vary less than domestic animals vary."[60] The conditions
of their existence, in fact, remaining practically constant, the animals
are no less constant themselves.

The writer of the above could hardly be claimed as a very thick and thin
partisan of immutability, even though he had not shown from the first
how clearly he saw that there was no mi