Evolution, old and new, or, The theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Charles Darwin / By Samuel Butler, author of "Erewhon," ... Op. 4.

  • Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution, old and new, or, The theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Charles Darwin / By Samuel Butler, author of "Erewhon," ... Op. 4. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward tells us, as we shall see later on, that he illustrated this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty administering 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 has 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. Natu- rally enough, the Sorbonne objected to an artifice which even Buffon could not conceal completely. They did not like being undermined; like Buffon himself, they pre- ferred imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. Buffon made his peace with the Sorbonne immediately, and, perhaps, from that time forward, contradicted him- self a little more impudently than heretofore. It is probably for the reasons above suggested that Buffon did not propound a connected scheme of evolu- tion 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 evolu- tionary 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