IN

ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.

1879.

BIOLOGY.

N responding to the honour which the authorities of the British Association have conferred in nominating me to fill this chair, I have deemed it best not to occupy your very valuable time with any matter of detail at which I may happen to have worked, but rather to offer to you a few remarks on questions which seem to me to have a general biological interest.

Last year my esteemed friend, Professor Flower, called your attention to the great name of LINNÆUS. I propose this year to refer to Linnæus's illustrious contemporary, BUFFON-not, however, in the character of a rival of Linnæus. Each was a man of genius, each did good work in his own way-work still bringing forth fruit. It must be admitted, however, that they were men of a very different stamp, and if it is necessary to express a relative judgment with respect to them, I should feel myself inclined to say that Buffon's mind had the greater aptitude for sagacious speculation, with an inferior power of acquiring and arranging a knowledge of facts of structure.

Various circumstances have concurred to favour our recollection of the merits of the great Swede, and to obscure those of the French naturalist. The well-earned fame of Linnæus is kept ever fresh in our memories by the necessarily frequent references to him in matters of nomenclature. On

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the other hand, not only are Buffon's claims on our esteem in no similar way brought before us, but those very speculative opinions of his, which are a merit in our eyes, gained him disfavour with our immediate predecessors, whose opinions and sentiments we more or less inherit.

No one, however, can dispute Buffon's title to our grateful respect on account of the very powerful effect his writings had in stimulating men's love of nature, an effect which I think is not sufficiently appreciated.

It is fitting that I should call attention to his (once generally recognised) claims in this respect; since my own love of natural history is probably due to the circumstance that his great work was one of the earliest with which I was familiar.

Buffon was indeed Linnæus's contemporary, for the same year (1707) saw the births of both. In 1733 he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and six years later was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi,1 which was the occasion of that work to which he is indebted for his fame, and to perfect which he displayed so much zeal in collecting specimens and in obtaining information respecting the various kinds of animals with which he became acquainted. His Histoire Naturelle générale et particulière began to appear in 1749, and in 1767 was published the fifteenth volume, which closed his history of mammals. Herein are contained those numerous anatomical illustrations (due, with their accompanying descriptions, to Daubenton) which have been again and again copied down to the

1 The Jardin du Roi was first instituted by Louis XIII. in 1628, and definitively established in 1635. It cannot be affirmed that Buffon enriched the incipient museum-the Cabinet du Roi-so much as might have been expected; although the skeletons which served for Daubenton's descriptions were, at least in many instances, preserved. It is to Geoffroy St.-Hilaire that the magnificent museum of the Jardin des Plantes, which now exists, is most indebted.

present time. Next came nine volumes on birds, then his history of minerals, and, finally, seven supplementary volumes, the last of which appeared in 1789, the year after his death. His life was thus prolonged ten years beyond that of his illustrious contemporary, Linnæus.

Buffon can claim no merit as a classifier. With the exception of the Apes of the old and new worlds (which respectively fill the fourteenth and fifteenth volumes of his work), the beasts treated of are hardly arranged on any system, beyond that of beginning with the best known and most familiar a system necessarily applicable to but a few forms.

But Buffon deliberately rejected the Linnæan classification -a grave error, certainly, yet one not altogether without excuse. Indeed, some of the objections he brought against that classification have considerable force. Such were his objections to the association of the hippopotamus, the shrewmouse, and the horse in one order, and of the monkey and the manis in another.1 What, indeed, could be more preposterous than the separation of the bat, Noctilio leporinus, from the other bats, and its association with the rodents, on the ground of its having (as supposed) only two incisor teeth above and two below?-an anomaly of arrangement of which you were reminded last year. It scarcely seems possible for the pedantry of classification to go further than this. Yet, perhaps, the association in one group of the walrus, the elephant, the ant-eater, the sloth, and the manatee was hardly less unphilosophical. Moreover, zoologists should not forget, in blaming Buffon for his want of appreciation of the classification of Linnæus, that one great portion of that classification-the classification of plants-has been superseded by us. Had he lived to witness the publication of Jussieu's Genera Plantarum,2 it might have given him a 1 Hist. Nat. tome i. p. 39. 2 This appeared in 1789.

truer insight into biological classification, and have led him to endeavour to improve on Linnæus's system instead of only criticising it.

But it is Buffon's speculative views which have most interest for us. Those views exercised a very widespread influence in their day, though the time was not ripe for them. Indeed, it is far from improbable that writers whose speculations have been made public at a more propitious season owe much to their comparatively forgotten predecessor.

Amongst Buffon's various speculations we might glance at his Théorie de la Terre (put forth in the very first volume of his work), and at his Epoques de la Nature, which fills the fifth volume of his supplement. We might consider his speculations concerning the formation of mountain and valley by water, and the evidence that there was present to the ear of his imagination

'The sound of streams, which, swift or slow,

Tear down Æolian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be.'

That he saw, in thought, the projection of the planets from the sun's mass; the primitive fluidity of the earth, and the secular refrigeration of the sun. Such considerations, however, are foreign to this Section. I will therefore select two which are of biological interest.

In the first place I may refer to Buffon's speculations concerning ANIMAL VARIATION. In this matter Isidore Geoffroy St.-Hilaire has affirmed that Buffon stands to the doctrine of animal variability in a position analogous to that in which Linnæus stands to the doctrine of the fixity of species.

Buffon, in his chapter on the animals of the Old and New World, remarks: 'It is not impossible that the whole of the 1 Op. cit., vol. ix. p. 127.

2 He thought that the American Jaguars, Ocelots, etc., and even the Peccary, were positive degradations of Old World forms. He also thought that

New World's animals are derived from the same source as those of the Old, whence they have descended. . . . Nature is in a state of perpetual flux.' In his chapter on the Degeneration of Animals1 he sums up saying: 'After comparing all the animals, and arranging them all in their own group, we shall find that the two hundred kinds described here may be reduced to a small number of original forms, whence it may be all the rest have issued.'

As to the modes and causes of the origin of new forms, he entertained four connected opinions :

(1) He attributed much modifying efficacy to migrations; (2) Also to the direct action of external conditions;

(3) He believed largely in the origin of new forms by degradation; and

(4) He regarded each animal as the manifestation of an individuating force, lying, as it were, at the root of the changes manifested by it.

The view that MIGRATION (with isolation) is a necessary antecedent to the origin of new species, is one which has been advocated by a modern naturalist, Moritz Wagner, who does not hesitate to affirm 3 that the formation of a really new species will only succeed when a few individuals, having crossed the barriers of their station, are able to separate themselves for a long time from the old stock.'

In support of his view the author brings forward a multitude of interesting facts, one of the most significant of which appears to me to be the following. It concerns Beetles of Tropical America of the genus Tetracha. In Venezuela (as the Llama, the American Apes, Agoutis, and Ant-eaters might be examples of such forms; but the Opossums, Sloths, and Tapirs he took to be original species. (See vol. xiv. pp. 272, 273.)

1 Vol. xiv. p. 358.

2 In a paper read before the Royal Academy of Sciences at Munich on March 2, 1868. This has been translated by Mr. James L. Laird, and published by Edward Stanford in 1873.

3 Op. cit., p. 29.