Species

86 Species

... if, by means of copulation, they can perpetuate themselves and the likeness of the

species; and we should regard them as belonging to different species if they are inca-

pable of producing progeny by the same means. Thus the fox will be known to be a

different species from the dog if it proves to be a fact that from the mating of a male

and female of these two kinds of animals no offspring is born; and even if there should

result a hybrid offspring, a sort of mule, this would sufce to prove that fox and dog are

not of the same species—inasmuch as this mule would be sterile (ne produirait rien).

For we have assumed that, in order that a species might be constituted, there was nec-

essary a continuous, perpetual and unvarying reproduction (une production continue,

perpétuelle, invariable)—similar, in a word, to that of other animals.^169

Intriguingly, Mayr in his history omits the last sentence, perhaps from a desire
to nd forerunners for his own biological species concept and downplay the mor-
phological aspect of species in predecessors.^170 Hence, we again nd in Buffon the
generative notion of species that, like Ray and Linnaeus and others before and after,
includes both form and reproduction.
Buffon had a mechanistic story for what kept organisms reproducing according
to type—it involved what he called the moule interieur, or interior mold. This was
an epigenetic, but particulate, hereditary factor that was held constant, or at least not
deformed too much. It was derived from the premier souche, the primary stock from
which all species of a type degenerated, and because it was shared, he was convinced
that all species within the type were actually one species and interfertile, and he
undertook experiments to prove this, with limited success.^171
His was not the rst reproductive concept of biological species but he was rst to
make reproductive isolation the test of whether two organisms should be included in
the same species. At other times, he seemed to claim that only the organisms them-
selves were real, and that species were just convenient ctions or names of biolo-
gists.^172 Inconsistent in his denitions over the course of the Natural History, he had
denied that species are real, asserting that only individuals exist (the rst example
of biological species “nominalism”). Farber and Eddy delimit two stages in Buffon’s
intellectual development.^173 At rst, around 1749, in his “Premier discours” (volume 1
of the Histoire) he declared that the reality of species cannot be determined using the
articial methods of naturalists. Later, in 1753, he stated that he considered species
to be the “constant succession of similar individuals that reproduce,” and that “[t]he
term species is itself an abstraction, which in reality corresponds only to the destruc-
tion and renewal of beings through time.”^174
In volume 2 of the Histoire (1749), Buffon adopted the notion of the moule interieur;
generation was entirely a physical process akin to Newtonian forces, in many ways similar

(^169) Lovejoy 1959, 93f.
(^170) Mayr 1982, 334.
(^171) Given Buffon’s heterodoxy, it is unlikely that he was directly inuenced by the Noachian logistics of
Buteo, Kircher, and Wilkins, but indirectly the notion that a primary species might diverge into local
varieties due to the inuence of geographical conditions which derived from it must have.
(^172) He called them naturalists, of course, because the term biology was not coined until the end of the
eighteenth century.
(^173) Farber 1971, Eddy 1994.
(^174) Full citations and page numbers to be found in Eddy 1994, 646n.