When
we come to the carnivora, additional reflections follow upon the
necessity for death, and even for violent death; this leads to the
question whether the creatures that are killed suffer pain; here, then,
will be the proper place for considering the sensations of animals
generally.
Perhaps the most pregnant passage concerning evolution is to be found in
the preface to the ass, which is so near the beginning of the work as to
be only the second animal of which Buffon treats after having described
man himself. It points strongly in the direction of his having believed
all animal forms to have been descended from one single common ancestral
type. Buffon did not probably choose to take his very first opportunity
in order to insist upon matter that should point in this direction; but
the considerations were too important to be deferred long, and are
accordingly put forward under cover of the ass, his second animal.
When we consider the force with which Buffon's conclusion is led up to;
the obviousness of the conclusion itself when the premises are once
admitted; the impossibility that such a conclusion should be again lost
sight of if the reasonableness of its being drawn had been once admitted;
the position in his scheme which is assigned to it by its propounder; the
persistency with which he demonstrates during forty years thereafter that
the premises, which he has declared should establish the conclusion in
question, are indisputable;--when we consider, too, that we are dealing
with a man of unquestionable genius, and that the times and circumstances
of his life were such as would go far to explain reserve and irony--is
it, I would ask, reasonable to suppose that Buffon did not in his own
mind, and from the first, draw the inference to which he leads his
reader, merely because from time to time he tells the reader, with a
shrug of the shoulders, that _he_ draws no inferences opposed to the Book
of Genesis? Is it not more likely that Buffon intended his reader to
draw his inferences for himself, and perhaps to value them all the more
highly on that account?
The passage to which I am alluding is as follows:--
"If from the boundless variety which animated nature presents to us,
we choose the body of some animal or even that of man himself to serve
as a model with which to compare the bodies of other organised beings,
we shall find that though all these beings have an individuality of
their own, and are distinguished from one another by differences of
which the gradations are infinitely subtle, there exists at the same
time a primitive and general design which we can follow for a long
way, and the departures from which (_degenerations_) are far more
gentle than those from mere outward resemblance.
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