Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/36

 Rh halfway between was a remarkable mental evolution to be covered in the space of less than sixty years. What was the cause of it?

The answer to this question is not a difficult one. Buffon was a pioneer, and not an overly courageous one. He was staggered by the immensity of the problem which he was trying to solve, and at the same time, fettered by the orthodox ideas of his day. And back of those ideas, as Buffon well knew, there was power—power of the church, of society, and of the scientific world. And neither the church, society, nor science was ready to accept the doctrine of descent, of organic evolution. Linnaeus, as we have seen, was easily the greatest and most influential zoologist of his day, and was at the same time a strong anti-evolutionist. His influence was so great that Buffon could hardly have escaped it, and this probably added to the difficulties of the vacillating evolutionist.

And so, when we considered the difficulties under which Buffon worked, we are not surprised that he found it hard to discover what his ideas on evolution should finally be. He was evidently no hero, willing to become a martyr for science, nor yet a dogmatist, willing to lay his own ideas down as law. Instead of ridiculing him for his indecision, therefore, we should sympathize with him because of his difficulties. Probably few of us would say or write very revolutionary things if we were loaded down with half-shed orthodoxy, and threatened by social and scientific