preferable to the most profound and ingenious that can be conceived,
for there is none of all the classifications which ever have been made
or ever can be, which has not more of an arbitrary character than this
has. Take it for all in all," he concludes, "it is more easy, more
agreeable, and more useful, to consider things in their relation to
ourselves than from any other standpoint." {165}

"Has it not a better effect not only in a treatise on natural history,
but in a picture or any work of art to arrange objects in the order
and place in which they are commonly found, than to force them into
association in virtue of some theory of our own? Is it not better to
let the dog which has toes, come after the horse which has a single
hoof, in the same way as we see him follow the horse in daily life,
than to follow up the horse by the zebra, an animal which is little
known to us, and which has no other connection with the horse than the
fact that it has a single hoof?" {166a}

Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more connection than this? The
writer whom we shall presently find {166b} declining to admit any
essential difference between the skeletons of man and of the horse, can
here see no resemblance between the zebra and the horse, except that they
each have a single hoof. Is he to be taken at his word?

It is perhaps necessary to tell the reader that Buffon carried the
foregoing scheme into practice as nearly as he could in the first fifteen
volumes of his Natural History. He begins with man--and then goes on to
the horse, the ass, the cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog, &c. One would be
glad to know whether he found it always more easy to know in what order
of familiarity this or that animal would stand to the majority of his
readers than other classifiers have found it to know whether an
individual more resembles one species or another; probably he never gave
the matter a thought after he had gone through the first dozen most
familiar animals, but settled generally down into a classification which
becomes more and more specific--as when he treats of the apes and
monkeys--till he reaches the birds, when he openly abandons his original
idea, in deference, as he says, to the opinion of "le peuple des
naturalistes."

Perhaps the key to this piece of apparent extravagance is to be found in
the word "mysterieuse." {166c} Buffon wished to raise a standing protest
against myst