FROM BUFFON TO DARWIN.
By the Rev. T.R.R. Stebbing, M.A., F.R.S., F.L.S.
[The Author has favoured us with the following revised report of his Presidential Address to the First Congress of the South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies, held at Tunbridge Wells in May last.—Ed.]
The Societies which have joined our Union are almost exclusively Natural History Societies. They are quite friendly to philosophy and literature, to mathematics and chemistry, to agriculture and political economy, to astronomy and the use of the globes, but they find their own more special and serious employment in zoology, botany, and geology. Towards these branches of knowledge the attitude of the public mind has changed in an extraordinary manner during the last hundred and fifty years. Fully to explain how this change has been brought about would require a volume—such a volume as Sir John Lubbock, or Sir Archibald Geikie, or Mr. Lecky might produce with fascinating effect. My intention to-day is only to recall briefly to your memories some of the more striking factors in the revolution.
In the forefront may be set a certain number of men whose work has had the distinctive quality of sooner or later exciting enthusiasm.
Of the French naturalist Buffon it has been said that "the warmth of his style and the brilliancy of his imagination are inimitable." In these days we are inclined to cavil when too much of the imaginative element is introduced into descriptive zoology, but Buffon had knowledge as well as brilliance, and was able by this combination to win the attention of Christendom to his accounts of the animal kingdom. Evidence direct and indirect of his merit and importance may be drawn from two very different sources. The direct is found in the circumstance that the famous French school of zoologists in the first half of this century called their encyclopædic history of animals 'Suites à Buffon.' They were content to describe it as a continuation of
