-unite to throw difficulties in the way of the
ornithologist."[133]

He points out the infinitely keener vision of birds than that of man and
quadrupeds, and connects it with their habits and requirements.[134] He
does not appear to consider it as caused by those requirements, though
it is quite conceivable that he saw this, but thought he had already
said enough. He repeatedly refers to the effects of changed climate and
of domestication, but I find nothing in the first volume which modifies
the position already taken by him in regard to descent with
modification: it is needless, therefore, to repeat the few passages
which are to be found bearing at all upon the subject. The chapter on
the birds that cannot fly, contains a sentence which seems to be the
germ that has been developed, in the hands of Lamarck, into the
comparison between nature and a tree. Buffon says that the chain of
nature is not a single long chain, but is comparable rather to something
woven, "which at certain intervals throws out a branch sideways that
unites it with the strands of some other weft."[135] On the following
page there is a passage which has been quoted as an example of Buffon's
contempt for the men of science of his time. The writer maintains that
the most lucid arrangement of birds, would have been to begin with those
which most resembled quadrupeds. "The ostrich, which approaches the
camel in the shape of its legs, and the porcupine in the quills with
which its wings are armed, should have immediately followed the
quadrupeds, but philosophy is often obliged to make a show of yielding
to popular opinions, and _the tribe of naturalists_ is both numerous and
impatient of any disturbance of its methods. It would only, then, have
regarded this arrangement as an unreasonable innovation caused by a
desire to contradict and to be singular."[136]

It is, I believe, held not only by "_le peuple des naturalistes_," but
by most sensible persons, that the proposed arrangement would not have
been an improvement. I find, however, in the preface to the third volume
on birds that M. Gueneau de Montbeillard described all the birds from
the ostrich to the quail, so the foregoing passage is perhaps his and
not Buffon's. If so, the imitation is fair, but when we reflect upon it
we feel uncertain whether it is or is not beneath Buffon's dignity.

Here, as often with pictures and music, we cannot criticise justly
without taking more into consideration th