Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/473

Rh It was, then, the application of this principle to natural history that was Buffon's main object in his preliminary discourse. The consequences of it, when it was applied in this field, were simple and evident and drastic: there can be no such thing as a "natural," or even a consistent "system" of classification, since there are no sharp-cut differences in nature, and since, therefore, species and genera are not real entities but only figments of the imagination. It is easy, Buffon wrote, to see the essential fault in the work of the systematists, the inventors of "methods" as a class.

Man, placing himself at the head of all created things and then observing one after another all the objects composing the universe,

In short, the whole notion of species is inconsistent with the conception of nature as a graded continuum of forms in which there are no breaks.

The vogue of the principle of continuity in the eighteenth century