ministering 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. 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