It may be noted by the way that the fact that the structures of living things are on the whole adaptative was not always obvious. Though to naturalists of this generation it is a truism, we have only to turn to Buffon to find that in his philosophy of nature it played no essential part. The passage in which Buffon describes what he regards as the forlorn and degraded condition of the Woodpecker is well known. We have come to think of the Woodpecker as a capital example of adaptation to the mode of life; but Buffon after enumerating the hard features of the bird's existence, forced to earn its living by piercing the bark of trees in an attitude of perpetual constraint, remarks[1] "Tel est l'instinct étroit et grossier d'un oiseau borné a une vie triste et chétive. Il a reçu de la Nature des organes et des instrumens appropriés a cette destinée _ou plutôt il tient cette destinée même des organes avec lesquels il est né_" (my italics). His reflexions on the Stilt (_Himantopus_) read even more strangely to us, accustomed as we are to see in the prodigious length and thinness of the shanks and in the other features of its organisation palpable adaptations to a wading life. For Buffon, however, this curious bird seemed a poor, neglected production, extravagant in its disproportions, one of the misfits of creation, left as a shadow in the picture composed of nature's more successful efforts.[2] This theme he develops at some length, being evidently well pleased with the idea. Our way of regarding these things is doubtless sounder and more fruitful than Buffon's, but it is well to remember that what seems so obvious to us looked quite differently to other excellent observers; and stupid as it may have been to have overlooked plain examples of adaptation, it is a far worse mistake to see adaptation everywhere. I do not seek to minimise the real and permanent difficulty which the existence of adaptations creates, but by the suggestion that all normal specific differences are adaptational that difficulty was quite gratuitously increased. In these respects it may be claimed that progress has been made, even if that progress seem outwardly of small account.