Buffon's Natural History. Volume 09 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &cBuffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History. Volume 09 (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
There is a much greater number of cloven-footed than whole-hoofed
animals. The oxen, the sheep, the goat, the antelope, the bubalus, the
lama, the pacos, the elk, the rein-deer, the stag, the fallow-deer,
the roe-buck, &c. are all cloven-footed, and compose all together full
forty-species. Thus, we have already fifty animals, ten whole hoofed,
and forty cloven-footed, to which the name of quadruped has been
rightly applied. In the digitated animals, the lion, tiger, panther,
leopard, lynx, cat, wolf, fox, dog, hyæna, civet, badger, weasel,
ferret, porcupine, hedge hog, armadillo, ant-eaters, and hog, which
last constitutes the shade between digitated and cloven-footed tribes,
add more than forty other species, to which the name of quadruped also
applies in all the rigour of its acceptation; because, though their
fore-feet are divided into four or five toes, they never use them as
hands; but all the other digitated species who use their fore-feet to
hold and carry food to their mouths, are not, in strict propriety,
quadrupeds. Those species, which are also forty in number, form an
intermediate class between quadrupeds and four-handed animals, and are
in fact neither one nor the other. Therefore, to more than a fourth of
our animals, the name of quadruped does not apply; and with more than
one half it does not agree in all the extent of its acceptation.
The four-handed animals fill up the great chasm between the quadruped
and the human species. The two handed are in the distance between
man and the cetaceous tribes. The bipeds with wings are the shade
between quadrupeds and birds; and the digitated species who use their
fore-feet as hands, fill up all the degrees between the quadrupeds and
the four-handed kinds. But this subject is too extensive to be here
pursued; however useful it might be to give a distinct knowledge of
animals, it is still more so by furnishing us with a new proof, that
not any of our definitions are precise, nor our general terms exact,
when specifically applied to objects, or to beings which they represent.
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