Buffon Sentence Examples
Buffon's opinion is, in fact, a sort of combination of views, essentially similar to those of Bonnet, with others, somewhat similar to those of the " Medici " whom Harvey condemns.
Buffon remarked that the same temperature might have been expected, all other circumstances being equal, to produce the same beings in different parts of the globe, both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Yet lawns in the United States are destitute of the common English daisy, the wild hyacinth of the woods of the United Kingdom is absent from Germany, and the foxglove from Switzerland.
We owe to Buffon the recognition of the limitation of groups of species to regions separated from one another by natural barriers.
The success of Edwards's very respectable work seems to have provoked competition, and in 1765, at the instigation of Buffon, the younger d'Aubenton began the publication known as the Planches enlumineez d'histoire naturelle, which appearing in forty-two parts was not completed till 1780, when the plates' it contained reached the number of 1008 - all coloured, as its title intimates, and nearly all representing birds.
Buffon was the first man who formed any theory that may be called reasonable of the geographical distribution of animals.
Great as were the services of Buffon to ornithology in one direction, those of a wholly different kind rendered by John m.
He retired on the completion of the sixth volume, and thereupon Buffon associated Bexon with himself.
About the time that Buffon was bringing to an end his studies of birds, Mauduyt undertook to write the Ornithologie of the Encyclopedic methodique - a comparatively easy task, considering the recent works of his fellow-countrymen on that subject, and finished in 1784.
The same draughtsman (who had in 1 775 produced a History of British Birds) in 1822 began another series of Figures of rare and curious Birds.8 The practice of Brisson, Buffon, Latham and others of neglecting to name after the Linnaean fashion the species they described gave great encouragement to compilation, and led to what has proved to be of some inconvenience to modern ornithologists.
Unfortunately none of these, however, can be compared for singularity with Archaeopteryx or with some American fossil forms next to be noticed, for their particular It is true that from the time of Buffon, though he scorned any regular classification, geographical distribution had been occasionally held to have something to do with systematic arrangement; but the way in which the two were related was never clearly put forth, though people who could read between the lines might have guessed the secret from Darwin's Journal of Researches, as well as from his introduction to the Zoology of the " Beagle" Voyage.
AdvertisementIt is curious that Laplace, while bestowing more attention than they deserved on the crude conjectures of Buffon, seems to have been unaware that he had been, to some extent, anticipated by Kant, who had put forward in 1755, in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, a true though defective nebular cosmogony.
Cuvier's doctrine of four plans of structure was essentially a morphological one, and so was the single-scale doctrine of Buffon and Lamarck, to which it was opposed.
Pallas also edited and contributed to Neue nordische Beitrage zur physikal schen Erdand Volkerbeschreibung, Naturgeschichte, and Oekonomie (1781-1796), published Illustrationes plantarum imperfecte vel nondum cognitarum (Leipzig, 1803), and con tributed to Buffon's Natural History a paper on the formation of mountains.
By the earlier English naturalists, and afterwards by Buffon, it was, however, applied to the Indian blackbuck, which is thus entitled to rank as the antelope.
In 1793 the Paris Museum of Natural History was re-established by law, and Buffon's idea of attaching to it a menagerie was carried out; the latter, as the collection in the Jardin des Plantes, still survives.
AdvertisementThe island was variously identified with America, Scandinavia, the Canaries and even Palestine; ethnologists saw in its inhabitants the ancestors of the Guanchos, the Basques or the ancient Italians; and even in the 17th and 18th centuries the credibility of the whole legend was seriously debated, and sometimes admitted, even by Montaigne, Buffon and Voltaire.
The brilliant French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788), in Les Epoques de la nature, included in his vast speculations the theory of alternate submergence and emergence of the continents.
Thus Cuvier, following Buffon, clearly anticipated the modern doctrine of faunal migrations.
To every Salon Houdon was a chief contributor; most of the leading men of the day were his sitters; his busts of d'Alembert, Prince Henry of Prussia, Gerbier, Buffon (for Catharine of Russia) and Mirabeau are remarkable portraits; and in 1778, when the news of Rousseau's death reached him, Houdon started at once for Ermenonville, and there took a cast of the dead man's face, from which he produced the grand and life-like head now in the Louvre.
Buffon accounted a grave defect of nature, and it must be confessed that no one has given what seems to be a satisfactory explanation of its precise use, though on evolutionary principles none will now doubt its fitness to the bird's requirements.
AdvertisementBuffon and his successors saw that the Tinamous, though passing among the European colonists of South America as "Partridges," could not be associated with those birds, and Latham's step, above mentioned, was generally approved.
Buffon, in a cautious, tentative fashion, suggested rather than stated the mutability of species and the influence of the forces of nature in moulding organisms. Immanuel Kant, in his Theory of the Heavens (1755), foreshadowed a theory of the development of unformed matter into the highest types of animals and plants, and suggested that the gradations of structure revealed by comparative anatomy pointed to the existence of blood relationship of all organisms, due to derivation from a common ancestor.
The smallest species, commonly known in English as the long-tailed or Buffon's generally likened to the marlinespike that is identified with the boatswain's position; but perhaps the authoritative character assumed by both bird and officer originally suggested the name.
Darwin died some years before the controversy upon the possibility of the hereditary transmission of acquired characters arose over the writings of Weismann, but Wallace has freely accepted the general results of the German zoologist's teaching, and in Darwinism has presented a complete theory of the causes of evolution unmixed with any trace of Lamarck's use or disuse of inheritance, or Buffon's hereditary effect of the direct influence of surroundings.
Linnaeus's primarily zoological classification of man did not, however, suit the philosophical opinion of the time, which responded more readily to the systems represented by Buffon, and later by Cuvier, in which the human mind and soul formed an impassable wall of partition between him and other mammalia, so that the definition of man's position in the animal world was treated as not belonging to zoology, but to metaphysics and theology.
AdvertisementThe school grew in numbers, and Barnes occupied all his spare time in assiduous study, reading during these years authors so diverse in character as Herodotus, Sallust, Ovid, Petrarch, Buffon and Burns.
His legal occupations did not prevent him from devoting himself also to literature, and after 1789 he published an account of a visit he had made to the comte de Buffon at Montbard.
On the completion of his arts course, he nominally studied divinity at Edinburgh until 1787; in1788-1789he spent rather more than a year as private tutor in a Virginian family, and from 1790 till the close of 1792 he held a similar appointment at Etruria in Staffordshire, with the family of Josiah Wedgwood, employing his spare time in experimental research and in preparing a translation of Buffon's Natural History of Birds, which was published in nine 8vo vols.
The encyclopaedic interest in nature, although in White's day culminating in the monumental synthesis of Buffon, was also disappearing before the analytic specialism inaugurated by Linnaeus; yet the catholic interests of the simple naturalist of Selborne fully reappear a century later in the greater naturalist of Down, Charles Darwin.
Buffon got four successive generations from the wolf and dog, and the mongrels were perfectly fertile together.
Maupertuis, who, together with Voltaire, introduced the new idea of the universe as based on Newton's discoveries, sought to account for the origin of organic things by the hypothesis of sentient atoms. Buffon the naturalist speculated, not only on the structure and genesis of organic beings, but also on the course of formation of the earth and solar system, which he conceived after the analogy of the development of organic beings out of seed.
It is remarkable that each of these writers seems to have been led, independently and contemporaneously, to invent the same name of " biology " for the science of the phenomena of life; and thus, following Buffon, to have recognized the essential unity of these phenomena, and their contradistinction from those of inanimate nature.
This enormous work was subsidized by the French government; and, though the figures are utterly devoid of artistic merit, they display the species they are intended to depict with sufficient approach to fidelity to ensure recognition in most cases without fear of error, which in the absence of any text is no small praise.2 But Buffon was not content with merely causing to be published this unparalleled set of plates.
Marcgrav under the name of " Anhima," it was more fully described and better figured by Buffon under that of Kamichi, still applied to it by French writers.
The best testimony for the behaviour of Orleans during this summer is the testimony of an English lady, Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who shared his heart with the comtesse de Buffon, and from which it is absolutely certain that at the time of the riot of the 12th of July he was on a fishing excursion, and was rudely treated by the king on the next day when going to offer him his services.
He indeed became so disgusted with the false position of a pretender to the crown, into which he was being forced, that he wished to go to America, but, as the comtesse de Buffon would not go with him, he decided to remain in Paris.
Bonnet's eminent contemporary, Buffon, held nearly the same views with respect to the nature of the germ, and expresses them even more confidently.
The " moule interieur " of Buffon is the aggregate of elementary parts which constitute the individual, and is thus the equivalent of Bonnet's germ, as defined in the passage cited above.
But Buffon further imagined that innumerable "molecules organiques " are dispersed throughout the world, and that alimentation consists in the appropriation by the parts of an.
See particularly Buffon, l.c. p. 41.
Buffon (1753-1778), at first a partisan of the absolute immutability of species, subsequently appears to have believed that larger or smaller groups of species have been produced by the modification of a primitive stock; but he contributed nothing to the general doctrine of evolution.