Buffon's Natural History, Volume 03 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c.Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History, Volume 03 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c.
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
Natural history
To be perfectly convinced that these organized bodies are not real
animals, we need only reflect on the preceding experiments. The moving
bodies in the seminal liquor have been taken for animals, because they
have a progressive motion, and are thought to have a tail; but if we
consider, on one hand, the nature of this progressive motion, which
finishes in a very short time without ever renewing its motion; and
on the other, the nature of these tails, which are only threads which
the moving bodies draw after them, we shall begin to hesitate; for an
animal goes sometimes slow, sometimes fast, and sometimes remains in
a state of rest; these moving bodies, on the contrary, always continue
the same motion, and I have never seen them stop and renew their
movement again. I ask, whether this kind of continued motion, without
any rest, is common to animals, and if that ought not to make us doubt
these moving bodies being real animals? An animal of any kind must also
have a constant form and distinct limbs; but these moving bodies vary,
and change their forms every moment, have no distinct limbs, and their
tails appear as a part which does not belong to the individual. Can
we then imagine these bodies to be real animals? In seminal liquors
filaments are seen which lengthen and appear to vegetate; after which
they swell and produce moving bodies. These filaments may be kinds
of vegetables, but the moving bodies which spring from them cannot
be animals, for a vegetable has never yet been seen to produce an
animal. These moving bodies are found in all vegetable and animal
substances; they are not produced by the modes of generation, they
have no uniformity of species, and therefore can neither be animals
nor vegetables. They are to be met with in the flesh of animals, and
in the substance of vegetables, but are most numerous in their seeds;
is it not therefore natural to regard them as living organic particles
which compose the animal or vegetable; as particles which having motion
and a kind of life, ought, by their union, to produce moving and living
beings, and so form animals and vegetables?
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