emble_, which shall not only be
capable of feeling in all its parts, but shall be so arranged that all
these feeling parts shall have a close correspondence with one another,
and that no one of them can be disturbed without communicating a portion
of that disturbance to every other part. There must also be a single
chief centre, with which all these different disturbances may be
connected, and from which, as from a common _point d'appui_, the
reactions against them may take their rise. Hence man, and those animals
whose organization most resembles man's, will be the most capable of
perceptions, while those whose unity is less complete, whose parts have
a less close correspondence with each other--which have several centres
of sensation, and which seem, in consequence, less to envelope a single
existence in a single body than to contain many centres of existence
separated and different from one another--these will have fewer and
duller perceptions. The polypus, which can be reproduced by fission; the
wasp, whose head even after separation from the body still moves, lives,
acts, and even eats as heretofore; the lizard which we deprive neither
of sensation nor movement by cutting off part of its body; the lobster
which can restore its amputated limbs; the turtle whose heart beats long
after it has been plucked out, in a word all the animals whose
organization differs from our own, have but small powers of perception,
and the smaller the more they differ from us."[93]

This is Buffon's way of satirizing our inability to bear in mind that we
are compelled to judge all things by our own standards. He also wishes
to reassure those who might be alarmed at the tendency of some of his
foregoing remarks, and who he knew would find comfort in being told that
a thing which does not express itself as they do does not feel at all.

The diaphragm according to Buffon appears to be the centre of the powers
of sensation; the slightest injury "even to the attachments of the
diaphragm is followed by strong convulsions, and even by death. The
brain which has been called the seat of 'sensations' is yet not the
centre of 'perception,' since we can wound it, and even take
considerable parts of it away, without death's ensuing, and without
preventing an animal from living, moving and feeling in all its parts."

Buffon thus distinguishes between "sensation" and "perception."
"Sensation," he says, "is simply the activity of a sense, but perceptio