niform."[117] Buffon then dwells upon the possession of a soul by man;
"even the lowest creature," he avers, "which had this, would have become
man's rival."

"The ape then is purely an animal, far from being a variety of our own
species, he does not even come first in the order of animals, since he
is not the most intelligent: the high opinion which men have of the
intelligence of apes is a prejudice based only upon the resemblance
between their outward appearance and our own."[118] But the undiscerning
were not only to be kept quiet, they were to be made happy. With this
end, if I am not much mistaken, Buffon brings his chapter on the
nomenclature of apes to the following conclusion:--

"The ape, which the philosopher and the uneducated have alike regarded
as difficult to define, and as being at best equivocal, and midway
between man and the lower animals, proves in fact to be an animal and
nothing more; he is masked externally in the shape of man, but
internally he is found incapable of thought, and of all that constitutes
man; apes are below several of the other animals in respect of qualities
corresponding to their own, and differ essentially from man, in nature,
temperament, the time which must be spent upon their gestation and
education, in their period of growth, duration of life, and in fact in
all those profounder habits which constitute what is called the 'nature'
of any individual existence."[119] This is handsome, and leaves the more
timorous reader in full possession of the field.

Buffon is accordingly at liberty in the following chapter to bring
together every fact he can lay his hands on which may point the
resemblance between man and the Orang-outang most strongly; but he is
careful to use inverted commas here much more freely than is his wont.
Having thus made out a strong case for the near affinity between man and
the Orang-outang, and having thrown the responsibility on the original
authors of the passages he quotes, he excuses himself for having quoted
them on the ground that "everything may seem important in the history of
a brute which resembles man so nearly," and then insists upon the points
of difference between the Orang-outang and ourselves. They do not,
however, in Buffon's hands come to much, until the end of the chapter,
when, after a _resume_ dwelling on the points of resemblance, the
differences are again emphatically declared to have the best of it.

I need not follow Buffon through