The answer to this question is not a difficult one. Buffon was a pioneer, and not an overly courageous one. He was staggered by the immensity of the problem which he was trying to solve, and at the same time, fettered by the orthodox ideas of his day. And back of those ideas, as Buffon well knew, there was power--power of the church, of society, and of the scientific world. And neither the church, society, nor science was ready to accept the doctrine of descent, of organic evolution. Linnaeus, as we have seen, was easily the greatest and most influential zoologist of his day, and was at the same time a strong anti-evolutionist. His influence was so great that Buffon could hardly have escaped it, and this probably added to the difficulties of the vacillating evolutionist. And so, when we considered the difficulties under which Buffon worked, we are not surprised that he found it hard to discover what his ideas on evolution should finally be. He was evidently no hero, willing to become a martyr for science, nor yet a dogmatist, willing to lay his own ideas down as law. Instead of ridiculing him for his indecision, therefore, we should sympathize with him because of his difficulties. Probably few of us would say or write very revolutionary things if we were loaded down with half-shed orthodoxy, and threatened by social and scientific ostracism in case we made a departure from the well beaten path. The next important figure in evolution is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great Charles Darwin. He was a country physician, a poet, and a very accurate naturalist, but unfortunately buried his ideas in volumes of verse and of combined medicine and philosophy. He believed in the spontaneous origin of the lower animals, but maintained that all of the higher forms were products of natural reproduction. The transition from water-to-land-dwelling animals he illustrated, not by fanciful creations, but by the classic example of the development of the frog, which begins life as a legless tadpole, and ends it as an animal incapable of breathing under water. To man Dr. Darwin gave much attention, devoting a whole canto to the human hand--“The hand, first gift of Heaven!”--and outlining the development of man’s various faculties. Farther on he describes the struggle for existence in lines which remind one of Tennyson’s description of nature, except that they lack Tennyson’s inevitable syrupiness. Evidently, however, Darwin fails to connect this struggle with its obvious result, the survival of the fittest.