feelings and perceptions in the
spinal marrow, which no animal is without, than in the brain which is
not an organ common to all creatures that can feel."

If Buffon's ideas concerning the brain are as just as they appear to be,
the resemblance between plants and animals is more close than is
apparent, even to a superficial observer, on a first inspection of the
phenomena. Such an observer, however, on looking but a little more
intently, will see the higher _vertebrata_ as perambulating vegetables
planted upside down. So the man who had been born blind, on being made
to see, and on looking at the objects before him with unsophisticated
eyes, said without hesitation that he saw "men as trees walking," thus
seeing with more prophetic insight than either he or the bystanders
could interpret. For our skull is as a kind of flower-pot, and holds the
soil from which we spring, that is to say the brain; our mouth and
stomach are roots, in two stories or stages; our bones are the
trellis-work to which we cling while going about in search of
sustenance for our roots; or they are as the woody trunk of a tree; _we_
are the nerves which are rooted in the brain, and which draw thence the
sustenance which is supplied it by the stomach; our lungs are leaves
which are folded up within us, as the blossom of a fig is hidden within
the fruit itself.

This is what should follow if Buffon's theory of the brain is allowed to
stand, which I hope will prove to be the case, for it is the only
comfortable thought concerning the brain that I have met with in any
writer. I have given it here at some length on account of its
importance, and for the illustration it affords of Buffon's hatred of
mystery, rather than for its bearing upon evolution. The fact that our
leading men of science have adopted other theories will weigh little
with those who have watched scientific orthodoxy with any closeness.
What Buffon thought of that orthodoxy may be gathered from the
following:--

"The greatest obstacles to the advancement of human knowledge lie less
in things themselves than in man's manner of considering them. However
complicated a machine the human body may be, it is still less
complicated than are our own ideas concerning it. It is less difficult
to see Nature as she is, than as she is presented to us. She carries a
veil only, while we would put a mask over her face; we load her with our
own prejudices, and suppose her to act and to conduct her oper