The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [119]
For Buffon, the act of classification was a human and therefore subordinate affair, capable of error. The task as he saw it was to explain the observed uniformities in nature as the necessary results of the operation of hidden causes working through laws, forces and elements. Buffon saw less order than Linnaeus, however. Some organisms fitted the pattern well, others less so. The fixity of species was clearly not total, since domestication had brought about changes, or at any rate degeneration from the original type. There had, therefore, to be some influence at work, some mechanisms which produced change, even if only in inferior forms. Buffon believed that God had created archetypes which still existed and formed the superior type of organism.
He avoided the problem of contradicting God with the view that organisms were affected by the environment through absorption of particles of food. This ‘food’collected in the genital organs, so that later offspring were altered by its presence.
Illustrations from Paley’s Natural Theology, in which he offered proof of design in nature by showing that each characteristic form in an organism had a functional purpose.
In Buffon’s view classes and genera existed only in the imagination. Holding a Neoplatonist view, as opposed to the Aristotelianism of Linnaeus, Buffon postulated a great chain of being, ascending in mystical value from slime to man. In such a system some measure of change might be permitted, for every stage of increasing complexity in organisms was included. Truffles were placed above stones, though below mushrooms, thus bridging the gap between organic and inorganic life. The higher gradations of existence were also permanently set in their places according to intelligence. This was proved by such animals as the whale, which could never ascend the chain due to its unintelligent acceptance of the North Pole as a suitable habitat.
However much Buffon disagreed with Linnaeus, however, he followed the generally accepted view that God had created the correct number of organisms and that the most probable moment of Creation had been at 9 am on 26 October 4004 BC,as calculated by Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century.
The completeness of the animal kingdom was soon to be questioned. As the Industrial Revolution advanced and the demand for metal increased, the number of mining academics rose and with them the amount of geological research. Giovanni Arduino, Inspector of Mines in Tuscany, Johann Gottlob Lehmann, a teacher of mining and mineralogy in Berlin, and Abraham Werner, of the Freiburg Academy of Mines, all noted the superposition of strata underground. The deeper they were the older, they presumed, the strata were. They also noted that there appeared to be fossils embedded in the strata and that many of those which were present in the higher, younger strata were absent in the older, deeper layers.
The study of strata was to become the passion of an English surveyor and canal-builder called William Smith. Smith carried out his first underground survey for coal in Somerset in 1791. In March 1793 he was asked by a local committee to survey preliminary levels for a proposed canal which was to link the coalfields of Somerset with the Kennet and Avon canal. While taking these levels Smith noticed a regularity about the eastward dip in all the strata revealed by excavation. On a journey to Newcastle-upon-Tyne he saw confirmation of his idea that strata were continuous, integral layers. On his return, when he began cutting the canal in a section heading towards the Swan Inn on the Bath Turnpike, Smith saw that the canal bed went through three separate strata - a fact he was able to recognise by the different fossils found in each of them.
Buffon’s Jardin du Roi, later known as the Jardin