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conclusion. We find passages which show a clear apprehension of facts
that the world is only now beginning to consider established, followed
by others which no man who has kept a dog or cat will be inclined to
agree with. I think I have already explained this sufficiently by
referring it to the impossibility of his taking any other course under
the circumstances of his own position and the times in which he lived.
Buffon does not deal with such pregnant facts, as, for example, the
geometrical ratio of increase, in such manner as to suggest that he was
only half aware of their importance and bearing. On the contrary, in the
very middle of those passages which, if taken literally, should most
shake confidence in his judgment, there comes a sustaining sentence, so
quiet that it shall pass unnoticed by all who are not attentive
listeners, yet so encouraging to those who are taking pains to
understand their author that their interest is revived at once.

Thus, he has insisted, and means insisting much further, on the many
points of resemblance between man and the lower animals, and it has now
become necessary to neutralize the effect of what he has written upon
the minds of those who are not yet fitted to see instinct and reason as
differentiations of a single faculty. He accordingly does this, and, as
is his wont, he does it handsomely; so handsomely that even his most
admiring followers begin to be uncomfortable. Whereon he begins his next
paragraph with "Animals have excellent senses, but not _generally, all
of them_, as good as man's."[72] We have heard of damning with faint
praise. Is not this to praise with faint damnation? Yet we can lay hold
of nothing. It was not Buffon's intention that we should. An ironical
writer, concerning whom we cannot at once say whether he is in earnest
or not, is an actor who is continually interrupting his performance in
order to remind the spectator that he is acting. Complaint, then,
against an ironical writer on the score that he puzzles us, is a
complaint against irony itself; for a writer is not ironical unless he
puzzles. He should not puzzle unless he believes that this is the best
manner of making his reader understand him in the end, or without having
a _bonne bouche_ for those who will be at the pains to puzzle over him;
and he should make it plain that for long parts of his work together he
is to be taken according to the literal interpretation of his words;
but if he has