observed the above duly, he is a successful or
unsuccessful writer according as he puzzles or fails to do so, and
should be praised or blamed accordingly. To condemn irony entirely, is
to say that there should be no people allowed to go about the world but
those to whom irony would be an impertinence.

Having already in some measure reassured us by the faintness with which
he disparages the senses of the lower animals, Buffon continues, that
these senses, whether in man or in animals, may be greatly developed by
exercise: which we may suppose that a man of even less humour than
Buffon must know to be great nonsense, unless it be taken to involve
that animals as well as man can reflect and remember; it now, therefore,
becomes necessary to reassure the other side, and to maintain that
animals cannot reflect, and have no memory. "_Je crois_," he writes,
"_qu'on peut demontrer que les animaux n'ont aucune connaissance du
passe, aucune idee du temps, et que par consequent ils n'ont pas la
memoire_."[73]

I am ashamed of even arguing seriously against the supposition that this
was Buffon's real opinion. The very sweepingness of the assertion, the
baldness, and I might say brutality with which it is made, are
convincing in their suggestiveness of one who is laughing very quietly
in his sleeve.

"Society," he continues, later on, "considered even in the case of a
single human family, involves the power of reason; it involves feeling
in such of the lower animals as form themselves into societies freely
and of their own accord, but it involves nothing whatever in the case of
bees, who have found themselves thrown together through no effort of
their own. Such societies can only be, and it is plain have only been,
the results--neither foreseen, nor ordained, nor conceived by those who
achieve them--of the universal mechanism and of the laws of movement
established by the Creator."[74] A hive of bees, in fact, is to be
considered as composed of "ten thousand animated automata."[75] Years
later he repeats these views with little if any modification.[76] A
still more remarkable passage is to be found a little farther on. "If,"
he asks, "animals have neither understanding, mind, nor memory, if they
are wholly without intelligence, and if they are limited to the exercise
and experience of feeling only," and it must be remembered that Buffon
has denied all these powers to the inferior animals, "whence comes that
remarkable prescient i