"Added to all these noble individual features the lion has also what may be called a _specific_ nobility. For I call those species noble which are constant, invariable, and which are above suspicion of having degenerated. These species are commonly isolated, and the only ones of their genus. They are distinguished by such well-marked features that they cannot be mistaken, nor confounded with any other species. To begin for example with man, the noblest of created beings; he is but of a single species, inasmuch as men and women will breed freely _inter se_ in spite of all existing differences of race, climate and colour; and also inasmuch as there is no other animal which can claim either a distant or near relationship with him. The horse, on the other hand, is more noble as an individual than as a species, for he has the ass as his near neighbour, _and seems himself to be nearly enough related to it_; ... the dog is perhaps of even less noble species, approaching as he does to the wolf, fox, and jackal, _which we can only consider to be the degenerated species of a single family_"[99]--all which may seem very natural opinions for a French aristocrat in the days before the Revolution, but which cannot for a moment be believed to have been Buffon's own. I have not ascertained the date of Buffon's little quarrel with the Sorbonne, but I cannot doubt that if we knew the inner history of the work we are considering, we should find this passage and others like it explained by the necessity of quieting orthodox adversaries. He concludes the paragraph from which I have just been quoting by saying, "To class man and the ape together, or the lion with the cat, and to say that the lion is a _cat with a mane and a long tail_--this were to degrade and disfigure nature instead of describing her and denominating her species." Buffon very rarely uses italics, but those last given are his, not mine; could words be better chosen to make us see the lion and the cat as members of the same genus? No wonder the Sorbonne considered him an infelicitous writer; why could he not have said "cat," and have done with it, instead of giving a couple of sly but telling touches, which make the cat as like a lion as possible, and then telling us that we must not call her one? Sorbonnes never do like people who write in this way. "The lion, then, belongs to a most noble species, standing as he does alone, and incapable of being confounded with the tiger, leopard, ounce, &c., while, on the contrary, those species, which appear to be least distant from the lion, are very sufficiently indistinguishable, so that travellers and nomenclators are continually confounding them."[100]