ng sustenance to her infant." Buffon could not have done
anything like this.

Buffon never, then, "arraigned the Creator for what was wanting or
defective in His works;" on the contrary, whenever he was led up by an
irresistible chain of reasoning to conclusions which should make men
recast their ideas concerning the Deity, he invariably retreats under
cover of an appeal to revelation. Naturally enough, the Sorbonne
objected to an artifice which even Buffon could not conceal completely.
They did not like being undermined; like Buffon himself, they preferred
imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. Buffon made his peace
with the Sorbonne immediately, and, perhaps, from that time forward,
contradicted himself a little more impudently than heretofore.

It is probably for the reasons above suggested that Buffon did not
propound a connected scheme of evolution or descent with modification,
but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the
prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or
classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface
to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more
evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the
animal more familiarly--and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half
chapter when he does so--he writes no more about evolution, but gives an
admirable description, which no one can fail to enjoy, and which I cannot
think is nearly so inaccurate as is commonly supposed. These
descriptions are the parts which Buffon intended for the general reader,
expecting, doubtless, and desiring that such a reader should skip the dry
parts he had been addressing to the more studious. It is true the
descriptions are written _ad captandum_, as are all great works, but they
succeed in captivating, having been composed with all the pains a man of
genius and of great perseverance could bestow upon them. If I am not
mistaken, he looked to these parts of his work to keep the whole alive
till the time should come when the philosophical side of his writings
should be understood and appreciated.

Thus the goat breeds with the sheep, and may therefore serve as the text
for a dissertation on hybridism, which is accordingly given in the
preface to this animal. The presence of rudimentary organs under a pig's
hoof suggests an attack upon the doctrine of final causes in so far as it
is pretended tha