Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/559

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point and detail by detail, is not our wonder aroused rather by the resemblances than by the differences to be found between them?. . . It is but in the number of those bones which may be regarded as accessory, and in the lengthening or shortening or mode of attachment of the others, that the skeleton of the horse differs from that of the human body. . . . The foot of the horse (as M. Daubenton has shown), in appearance so different from the hand of man, is nevertheless composed of the same bones, and we have at the extremities of our fingers the same small hoof-shaped bone which terminates the foot of that animal. Judge, then, whether this hidden resemblance is not more marvelous than any outward differences, whether this constancy to a single plan of structure—which we can follow from man to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the cetacea, from the cetacea to birds, from birds to fishes, from fishes to reptiles—whether this does not seem to show that the Creator in making all these used but a single main idea, though varying it in every conceivable manner—so that man might admire equally the magnificence of the execution and the simplicity of the design.

But consideration of the anatomical homologies did not lead Buffon merely to pious reflections. He saw clearly and unequivocally declared that this unity of type forcibly suggests the hypothesis of community of descent. To one who considers only this class of facts, he wrote:

Buffon thus presented the hypothesis of evolution with entire definiteness, and indicated the homological evidence in its favor. But did he himself regard that evidence as conclusive, and therefore accept the hypothesis? The passage cited is immediately followed by a repudiation, ostensibly on theological grounds, of the ideas which he has been so temptingly presenting.

This repudiation has been regarded as ironical, or as inserted merely pro forma, by those interpreters of Buffon who have made him out a thorough-going evolutionist. Unfortunately, nearly all these