than the
reader has just seen ... it is 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."[41]

"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?"[42]

Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more connection than this? The
writer whom we shall presently find[43] 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 decide 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."[44] Buffon wished to raise a standing protest
against mystery mongering.