assigned. It is very long, and is headed "On Descent with
Modification" ("De la Degeneration des Animaux"). This is the chapter in
which Buffon enters more fully into the "causes or means" of the
transformation of species.

At the opening of the chapter on the nomenclature of monkeys, the theory
is broached that there is a certain fixed amount of life-substance as of
matter in nature; and that neither can be either augmented or
diminished. Buffon maintains this organic and living substance to be as
real and durable as inanimate matter; as permanent in its state of life
as the other in that of death; it is spread over the whole of nature,
and passes from vegetables to animals by way of nutrition, and from
animals back to vegetables through putrefaction, thus circulating
incessantly to the animation of all that lives.

As might be expected, Buffon is loud in his protest against any real
similarity between man and the apes--man has had the spirit of the Deity
breathed into his nostrils, and the lowest creature with this is higher
than the highest without it. Having settled this point, he makes it his
business to show how little difference in other respects there is
between the apes and man.

"One who could view," he writes, "Nature in her entirety, from first to
last, and then reflect upon the manner in which these two
substances--the living and the inanimate--act and react upon one
another, would see that every living being is a mould which casts into
its own shape those substances upon which it feeds; that it is this
assimilation which constitutes the growth of the body, whose development
is not simply an augmentation of volume, but an extension in all its
dimensions, a penetration of new matter into all parts of its mass: he
would see that these parts augment proportionately with the whole, and
the whole proportionately with these parts, while general configuration
remains the same until the full development is accomplished.... He would
see that man, the quadruped, the cetacean, the bird, reptile, insect,
tree, plant, herb, all are nourished, grow, and reproduce themselves on
this same system, and that though their manner of feeding and of
reproducing themselves may appear so different, this is only because the
general and common cause upon which these operations depend can only
operate in the individual agreeably with the form of each species.
Travelling onward (for it has taken the human mind ages to arrive at
thes