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Rh "Elucidation of the Conception of a Race of Men." These two essays do not significantly differ in doctrine, and they may most conveniently be dealt with here as slightly variant expressions of the same arguments and conclusions. They are among the most important documents for the determination of Kant's position with respect to the theory of evolution.

Kant derived not only most of his zoological facts, but also some of his ideas of scientific method, from Buffon. The latter, like Maupertuis, had ridiculed the "systems" and "methods" of the great systematists, Linnaeus and Tournefort, and had looked with a good deal of contempt upon their absorption in purely descriptive and classificatory science. Schemes of classification were convenient, no doubt, and accurate description essential; but there was a higher stage of scientific inquiry to which these were merely vestibulary. Buffon wrote:

We ought to try to rise to something greater and still more worthy of occupying us—that is to say, to combine observations, to generalize the facts, to link them together by the force of analogy, and to endeavor to arrive at that high degree of knowledge in which one can recognize particular effects as dependent upon more general effects, can compare nature with herself in her larger processes.

This spirit Kant had in some degree caught; and in the "Physical Geography" he proposes a modification in the nomenclature of the sciences which should express the distinction between two types of scientific inquiry. He observes:

In this, manifestly, Kant shows a lively sense of the nature and importance of genetic problems in the investigations of the naturalist. It is true that he somewhat naively makes the distinction between the