Sloan 1979

BUFFON, GERMAN BIOLOGY, AND
THE HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

OF BIOLOGICAL SPECIES
PHILLIP R. SLOAN*
I
THE entry of time and history into biological systems of classification is
perhaps the single most significant development in the history of biological
systematics in the modern era. Darwin's claiming that descent is '. . . the
hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have been seeking under the
term of the natural system',1 rather than seeing the answer in the multitude
of previous attempts to resolve the problem in terms of morphological
affinities, analogies, and complex relations of resemblance, marked the
turning point in a long search into the meaning of biological taxonomy,
and allowed the development of Darwin's insights by Haeckel, Plate and
others into modern phylogenetic systematics.
It will be argued in this paper that the means by which such a
historical interpretation of taxonomy entered into a subject which would
seem on the surface to involve only an atemporal logic of classes is an issue
that has roots considerably antedating Darwin's own reflections, and one
that has its origin in a complex of critical metaphysical and epistemological
issues of vital concern to Enlightenment thinkers that ultimately take
precedence over more specific and concrete empirical issues. As a result
of these eighteenth-century discussions, certain options were available in
biological theory from 1800 onwards, and were to be found in the writings
of influential naturalists, particularly in Germany, with which Darwin,
Haeckel, and others were familiar, and which seem to have played an
important role in the formulation of their own conceptions of phylogenetic
classification. Subsequent publications will explore these interconnexions
in detail.
In many respects, this paper is primarily concerned with the general
introduction of historical thinking into biology in the late Enlightenment,
and most importantly with the claim that there was some privileged
epistemological status to viewing organisms in terms of their history, rather
* General Program of Liberal Studies/Program in History and Philosophy of Science,

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA.
This is a revised version of a paper read in part at the XV International Congress of the
History of Science, Edinburgh, 18 August 1977. I wish to acknowledge the support of National
Science Foundation (grant GS 33728) for initial stages of the research, and a University of
Notre Dame O'Brien Fund grant for the later stages. I also wish to express my appreciation of
several criticisms and comments on the original draft of the paper by Michael Crowe, Thomas L.
Hankins, Jonathan Hodge, Rodney Kilcup, Camille Limoges, Ernst Mayr, and Timothy Lenoir.
I would like to thank Professor Everett Mendelsohn for help in gaining access to needed materials
at Harvard University. I have also been helped in some difficult translation problems by Dr Fritz
Marti, although the responsibility for all translations is my own.
THE BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Vol. 12 No. 41 (1979)
no PHILLIP R. SLOAN
than in terms of their atemporal relations. This concept, forming at least

a component of the general thesis of historicism,2 implies something more
than simply the notion that living organisms have some kind of temporal
history, or that, as components of the earth or cosmos, they can be under-
stood in terms of a theory of genetic development. Genetic accounts of
the development of the earth and solar system were, indeed, nothing new
by the time Buffon considered the issues; Descartes, Burnet, Woodward,
Hooke, and several others had formulated hypotheses of the origins of the
world from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards.
There were, however, at least two major problems that made the
historicization of biology conceptually difficult in the eighteenth century.
The first was a consequence of the reigning theory of generation, typically
conceived in terms of variations on the pre-existence theory, in which the
origin of organic beings was placed not in the temporal history in which
they phenomenally appeared, but at the first foundation of the world.
This theory, a consequence of the failure to find a satisfactory account of
generation in terms of the mechanical philosophy, is well summarized in
a review article appearing in 1691:
And Indeed, all the laws of Motion which are as yet discovered, can give
but a very lame Account of the Forming of a Plant or Animal. We see how
wretchedly Descartes came off, when he began to apply them to this
Subject. They are form'd by Laws yet unknown to Mankind; and it seems
most probable, the Stamina of all Plants and Animals that have been, or
ever shall be in the World, have been form'd ab Origine Mundi, by the
Almighty Creator, within the first of each respective Kind.3
While the complex history of this issue does not concern us here, it
is of critical importance to observe that such a theory of generation, in
any of its many forms, effectively removed organisms from the temporal
process.4 With the origin of living beings placed at the beginning of
history, time and circumstance could have only accidental bearing on them,
serving to account for abnormal productions, but leaving untouched a
deep essentialism at the basis of the organic species. 5
A more general difficulty in the path of a historicization of biological
systematics was a pervasive Enlightenment problem with the epistemological
status of any knowledge claims that attempted to reach from the present
into the past, whether this was in human history, or in geology, cosmology,
or biology. As the result of a particular conjunction of intellectual factors
in the Enlightenment, knowledge claims that went beyond the description
of the immediately given to claims about the prior history of natural
phenomena were problematic in the early decades of the eighteenth
century.6 The tendency to justify Newtonian attraction on phenomenalist
grounds; the reamrmation of radical historical pyrrhonism by Pierre
Bayle; the epistemology of Locke and Gassendi which gave greatest
certainty to ideas of immediate sensation; and the polemic of early
The Historical Interpretation of Biological Species 111
Enlightenment Newtonians against Cartesian 'world-building', came
together in a powerful opposition to claims to historical knowledge,
particularly as they were manifest in historical cosmology. 7 The great
popularizer of natural history, the Abbe Pluche, well expressed the
confines that some, at least, saw implied both by Newtonian science and
by empiricist epistemology: after surveying all attempts to construct
historical cosmologies to his day, he wrote:
Reason was not given us to know the bottom, or distinctly perceive the
nature, of any thing whatever. It may be said that our true logick does not
consist in studying how the mind performs its operations, but8rather in fully
convincing ourselves of its destination, capacity, and limits.
True science, Pluche argued, had now been recognized as resting solely
on the gathering of experiments, the avoidance of speculations, and a
basic scepticism about what can be known apart from immediate
experience. Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Ray, and Tournefort were praised for
following this true method:
None of them has in the course of his labours thought of Aristotle, of
Descartes, or of Newton. None of them has thought of any thing, but of
making us certain of some useful matter of fact, without attempting to
explain to us what a globule of air, what the texture of a fibre, the wing of
a scarabeus, or the balsam of an ananas, were. Our most excellent men in
the most celebrated academies are all of them tired with hunting after
evidence whichfliesfrom them, and are very well satisfied with experience,
which seldom fails to crown their labour with success. 9
In the wake of the growing positivism of early Enlightenment science,
reflected not only in Pluche, but in the writings of Musschenbroek,
s'Gravesande, Boerhaave, John Keill, and announced as the official policy
of the Academie des sciences by Fontenelle in 1733,10 it was not sufficient
simply to assert that biological concepts, or more specifically, the taxonomic
system, had some inherent historical significance.11 Also required was some
kind of alternative epistemological position from which one could tenably
sustain historical understanding against such strictures. It will be argued
that Buffon's key importance in the history of Enlightenment biology (a
significance that is broader than the subject matter of this paper) is to be
seen most generally in his attempt to give epistemological primacy to historical
understanding, of which his interpretation of the taxonomic system forms
but a part.
In my exposition, I will first discuss the background and significance
of Buffon's distinction between two ways of interpreting the meaning of
taxonomic categories, one in terms of an 'abstract' ideal order, and the
other according to a 'real and physical' order. I will then discuss the
reception of this dual interpretation in German biological circles, with
particular focus on the critical role of Immanuel Kant in the further
ii2 PHILLIP R. SLOAN
clarification and elaboration of some of these points, and follow the link
that leads from Kant through his disciple, Christoph Girtanner, to the
reflections on the concept of species in the writings of the important
codifier of biological concepts, Johann Karl Illiger. I will conclude with
reflections on what I interpret as a fundamental bifurcation occurring
in German taxonomic thought around 1800, and its consequences for
subsequent discussions of the meaning of the 'natural system'.
II
The roots of the topic at issue reach back from Buffon's biological
reflections to the seemingly remote Leibniz-Clarke controversy, which had
served to bring the science, metaphysics, and epistemology of Newtonianism
into clear confrontation with Continental science and philosophy. Among
the many central issues, one in particular, the controversy over the
nature of time and space, is crucial to the argument here. Newton's claim
in the Principia that time and space could be distinguished as relative and
absolute, real and apparent, had raised this problem to a new conceptual
prominence. It had then been refracted (albeit incorrectly) by many
Newtonians through Locke's analysis of time and space as abstract ideas."
As it became focused in the Leibniz-Clarke debate, the main issue was
the distinction between Newtonian time and space viewed as 'abstract',
and 'concrete and real' time and space immanent in created nature, as
defended by Leibniz.
To Newton's claim for the separate existence of time and space,
Leibniz had replied with a battery of metaphysical and logical arguments,
derived from his two foundational principles of the identity of indis-
cernibles and sufficient reason. Since both time and space would lack
any internal distinctions if abstracted from concrete bodies, God could
not choose one order of time and space over any other:
Space being uniform, there can be neither any external nor internal reason,
by which to distinguish its parts, and to make any choice between them.
For, any external reason to discern between them, can only be grounded
upon some internal one.'3
As Leibniz developed this point in the controversy with Clarke, the main
thrust of his argument was that apart from existent things, time and
space can have only an ideal existence. The reality of time and space is
found only in the relations of concrete bodies :
The parts of time or place, considered in themselves, are ideal things; and
therefore they perfectly resemble one another like two abstract units. But
it is not so with two concrete ones, or with two real times, or two spaces
filled up, that is, truly actual.
. . . Space is nothing else but an order of the existence of things,
observed Xas existing together . . . There is no real space out of the material
universe. 4
And concerning time,
[Newton makes] time a thing absolute, not dependent upon God; whereas
time does only coexist with creatures, and is only conceived by the order
and quantity of their changes.'5
In Leibniz's terms, time and space stand neither as physical attributes
of God, nor as external reference points in which the given cosmos is
situated, nor as simple mental abstractions. Rather, they have an
immanent reality, co-extensive with the very being of created nature, and
in the absence of a created world can stand only as possibilities in the
mind of God:
It is true, I maintain, that the immensity and eternity of God would subsist,
though there were no creatures; but those attributes would have no
dependence either on times or places. If there were no creatures, there would
be neither time nor place. . . . And therefore I don't admit . . . that if God
existed alone, there would be time and space as there is now. . . . In my
opinion, they would be only in the ideas of God as mere possibilities.16
Leibniz's views on time and space, left somewhat unsystematic and
undeveloped at his death in the midst of this controversy, implied a
significant reorientation of the relations of time and space to the natural
world. If time and space have their ontological grounding only in the
empirical relations of ordered succession and contemporaneous relation-
ship of bodies, the history of the world cannot be separated from the very
reality of time itself. Newton's cosmos might have allowed his followers to
reject historicity, and even restrict the world to a literalist Mosaic time
scale, while allowing time and space to remain infinite; this was clearly
not possible for Leibniz. Whatever real extension was given to time or
space necessarily meant a similar extension of the world of created beings.
As Alexandre Koyre writes:
Thus the material universe, in spite offillingonly an exceedingly small part

of the infinite void, became [with Leibniz] just as infinite as this. The same
reasoning which prevented God from limiting his creative action in respect
to space could, just as well, be applied to time. . . . The created world
became infinite both in Space and Time.1?
I would not argue from the above that Leibniz necessarily implied
that the earth had a prior history of great duration. God had been free,
he argued, to choose to create the world whenever he wished, and only
at that point did time become real. What is more, organisms were
exempted from any significant historicality by Leibniz's extreme endorse-
ii4 PHILLIP R. SLOAN
ment of the pre-existence theory in embryology, which went so far as to

render almost every individual organism immortal from the beginning of
the world.18 But what Leibniz did provide of relevance to the argument
of this paper is a separation of two orders, one abstract and ideal, and the
other immanent and real, with true temporality associated only with the
latter.
The abstract and metaphysical level of Leibniz's argument in the
Leibniz-Clarke controversy achieved systematic and clearly articulated
practical application in the work of his great synthesizer and syste-
matizer, the Halle professor of philosophy Christian Wolff. In the many
works which steadily flowed from his prolific pen from 1720 to 1750,
Wolff drew together an eclectic but highly creative synthesis of Leibnizian
metaphysics, scholasticism, and the content of the new science, into a
comprehensive philosophical and scientific programme, which ranged
from mathematics to comparative anatomy, from first philosophy to
jurisprudence, and from natural theology to cosmology.^ Wolff's further
elaboration of Leibniz's conclusions on the nature of time and space had a
direct significance for more concrete biological questions.
In his treatment of these topics, Wolff followed Leibniz in defining
time as 'the successive ordering in a continuous series', and argued that
'apart from the successive existence in a continual series, time does not
exist'.20 However, as was generally the case, Wolff attempted to make
Leibniz's conception of time (and space) practical and applicable to
concrete situations. The 'existence' of time was in the ordered succession of
concrete beings. A contemporary exposition of Wolff's philosophy,
prepared with Wolff's approval, put the point thus:
Time is thus the order of successive beings [litres] in a continuous series.

Mr Leibniz defined it [as] the order of successions, or of things which succeed
themselves; and elsewhere he said that it is the order of existence, but not in the
same time. Mr Wolff has perfected these definitions in adding to them these
words: 'in a continuous series', which are absolutely necessary . . .
It follows from this that time exists [a lieu] as soon as successive things
exist in a continuous series. This consequence is of great importance with regard
to the question of the creation of the world.21
The general importance of this for our topic is, first, that it rendered
the reality of time immanent in the successive existence of beings in a
series; secondly, it suggested that epistemologically there is a distinction
to be made between an abstract and ideal order of ideas, and a real order
of bodies in relational time and space, and that genuine science would
seek to grasp this real order. This point was implicitly made elsewhere in
the text cited above:
The world which exists, is the visible world, because it is necessary to distin-
guish it from the ideal world, or that which exists only in our ideas.
W e a d d that the successive things of this visible world, are also chained to one
another . . ., [and] the world is truly the series of finite beings, either coexistent or
successive, chained one to another."
The truth of empirical knowledge in fact lay in this grasp of the world in
terms of the succession and interconnexion of things, forming the founda-
tion of what some in this tradition were to define as physical truth, in a
technical sense of that term:
There is also in this world truth, on one hand because nothing is made
without a sufficient reason, and on the other, because nothing contradictory
finds a place there. The mechanism of the world is the source of its truth, and
is that which distinguishes it from the purely imaginary world.23
III
In attempting to connect the general issues of the preceding dis-
cussion with the concrete taxonomic issues that we will examine in Buffon's
writings, it is necessary to clarify Buffon's enigmatic intellectual affinities in
the period preceding the commencement of the Histoire naturelle.
A well established tradition of commentary on Buffon has typically
tended to place him in the Newton-Locke tradition which has so often
been discussed in analyses of the philosophe movement of the eighteenth
century.24 While I would in no sense deny that elements of both can be
found in Buffon's writings, and are manifest particularly in Buffon's
reliance on attractive forces both in his cosmology and in his theory of
generation, I would suggest that the key to the unity of his thought is to
be found in a somewhat idiosyncratic endorsement of Leibnizianism,
which in important ways led Buffon away from both Newton and Locke.
In the wake of the Leibniz-Clarke controversy, many perceptive and
influential Enlightenment thinkers were made acutely aware of the weak
epistemological and metaphysical foundations of Newtonian science,
particularly as it was being expounded by Clarke, John Keill,
s'Gravesande, Musschenbroek, and Jurin. And there is evidence that,
at least in France, many who ostensibly formed the backbone of the
'Newtonian' party, were in fact engaged in an attempt to synthesize,
generally through Wolffianism, aspects of both Newtonian and Leibnizian
metaphysics.25 The French Leibnizians in question, including Voltaire
(for a period), his mistress Madame du Chatelet, and Maupertuis, formed
a group of interconnected figures that had their intellectual centre at
du Chatelet's provincial estate at Cirey, through which both travellers
from Germany, and manuscripts of Wolff's philosophy, were conveyed
into France.26
Madame du Chatelet's open conversion to the Leibniz-Wolff
philosophy in 1739-40 has now been well described by several scholars.
116 PHILLIP R. SLOAN
In 1740 her Institutions of physics appeared, with the first eight chapters
giving a general summary and exposition of Wolff's philosophy.27 This
work served, it seems, to draw attention to the way in which Leibnizianism
could be made readily accessible, and applicable to practical scientific
issues.28 It also indicated the way in which individuals who might have
embraced certain Newtonian principles in mechanics could nevertheless
seek epistemological and metaphysical foundations in Leibnizianism.29
Thus, it is not surprising to see du Chatelet openly siding with Leibniz
and Wolff on the nature of time and space,3° and more interestingly,
defending their distinction between the 'abstract' and 'concrete' orders.
The 'abstract' concept of absolute time and space was considered a
useful fiction, but such concepts were dangerous if confused with the real
foundations:
It is only necessary to take care that one is not misled by these; because the
imaginary notions, which infinitely aid the search after truths which
depend on their elucidation, [and] which are beings which the imagination
has formed, become very dangerous when they are taken for realities.31
It was the generalization of this epistemological thesis, made explicit in
the writings of Wolff, du Chatelet, and other contemporary French
Wolffians,32 that provided the enigmatic principle of unity in BufFon's
subsequent scientific writings.
Evidence of BufFon's conversion to this principle can be discerned in
a close study of his writings after 1740. By this time, he had been forced
to re-examine the controversy between Leibniz and Newton while pre-
paring his translation of Newton's Fluxions.33 In the early 1740s, BufFon was
closely acquainted with prominent Wolffians like Samuel Koenig,
Madame du Chatelet's private tutor in Wolffian philosophy, and had read
and praised du Chatelet's Institutions de physique.34 More significantly, it
was the generalization oF the Wolffian distinction between the 'abstract'
and 'real' orders that became a fundamental axiom of all of BufFon's
subsequent writings.
This is to be seen immediately in BufFon's apparently paradoxical
'First discourse on the manner of studying and treating natural history',
a work intended as a Discours de la methode for a new approach to natural
history, and which was prepared and delivered publicly in 1744, and
published as the opening discourse of the Histoire naturelle generate et
particuliire of 1749. Many have seen in this text an underlying epistemo-
logical scepticism, and in his remarks on the value of classification in
biology, an advocacy of a radical nominalism. But with the background
we have now sketched, BufFon's remarks can be seen as resting on the
Leibnizian distinction of the 'abstract' and 'concrete' orders. This was
well summarized in his seemingly paradoxical argument against the
applicability of mathematical analysis in natural history:
. . . In all these cases one always makes suppositions contrary to nature,
depriving the subject of the majority of its qualities, making of it an
abstract being which no longer resembles the real being. One then
transports this ideal result into the real subject . . .
This is the most delicate and most important point in the study of the
sciences—to know properly how to distinguish that which is real in a
subject from that which we have arbitrarily placed there in considering it.35
This concern with the separation of the 'abstract' from 'real' orders can
then be clearly seen to underlie Buffon's attack on taxonomy, particularly
Linnaean taxonomy. His argument is that Linnaeus committed the
fundamental error of confusing the abstract and arbitrary ordering of
concepts with the real and physical order of nature:
[The Linnaean system] is not a science, and is at most only a convention,
an arbitrary language, a means of understanding; from it results no real
knowledge [connoissance reele~\.i6
If I am correct in asserting that Buffon's approach to natural history

was grounded on a fundamental Leibnizian premise, there are several
consequences that immediately bear on the meaning Buffon ascribed to
taxonomic systems. This was not that all classification is purely arbitrary,
but rather that one could understand the various taxa at the different
category levels—species, genera, orders, etc.—in two ways, in one as an
'abstract' entity of reason, and in the other as grounded on the succession
of real time and space in the Leibnizian understanding of those concepts.37
We have seen that Wolff had previously defined the 'reality' of the world
as constituted by the totality of finite beings existing in causal chains of
succession that comprise the immanence of time; Buffon, by 1749, had
made the organic species the prime example of such a successional series,
in which the real character is found in the continuity of reproduction.
As he put it in the first statement of his species concept,
This power of producing its like, the chain of successive existences of

individuals, constitutes the real existence [existence reele] of the species.3 8
And as this was developed in greatest detail in his article on 'The ass',
published in 1753, but apparently written by 1750:
. . . It is neither the number, nor the collection of similar individuals
which makes the species. It is the constant succession and uninterrupted
renewal of these individuals which constitute it . . . The species is thus an
abstract and general word for which the thing [ckose] exists only when we
consider Nature in the succession 39
of time, and in the constant destruction
and renewal of creatures [Ores'].
The critical innovation in BufFon's species concept is not so much

the postulation of an operational criterion of species identity, fertile inter-
breeding, which others before Buffon had already made,4° but rather
rests on the metaphysical connexion of organic species with the immanence
of time. The very reality of the species was a temporal reality, with each
organic species governed by its own inherent and specific force, the so-
called moule interieure, that could not itself exist 'apart' from the molecules
organiques which constituted the material being of the creature.41 Thus
there was no inherent inconsistency between Buffon's assertion in his
article on 'The ass' that taxa above the rank of species—genera, families,
and orders—were still only 'abstract',4* and his subsequent admission of
such larger groupings in a 'real and physical' sense when empirical
evidence was strong enough to suggest the historical and material connexions
of forms in a common origin.43 The principles on which Buffon's 'physical'
concept of species was based were simply extended to encompass a general,
if unsystematic, reinterpretation of the higher categories of the Linnaean
hierarchy: for Linnaean categories defined by common morphological
characters, Buffon substituted physical networks of historical filiation.44
A 'variety', in Buffon's sense, was thus not Linnaeus's accidental
variant,45 showing inconstancy of character, but a subordinate historical
lineage within a 'real and physical' species, produced by degenerative
change in response to environmental conditions:
Climate and flood influence the form of animals in such a prominent way
that their effects cannot be doubted; and although these [effects] would be
less rapid, apparent and sensible on man, we must conclude, by analogy,
that these effects are found in the human species, and that they manifest
themselves by the varieties that are found there . . . At first these alterations
were not prominent, and produced only individual variants. Then these
became varieties of the species, because they had become more general,
more sensible, and more constant by the continued action of these same
causes.46
In Buffon's view, a more permanent variety in this sense became a

'race', a term apparently first brought into scientific prominence in these
discussions by Buffon. He defined this concept most clearly in his late
Epoques de la nature of 1778, but in terms fully consistent with his earliest
discussion of the concept: 'The races in each species of animal are only
constant varieties which perpetuate themselves by generation'.47
A genus in this 'physical and real' sense, when Buffon finally did
admit such a designation, was a group of interconnected lineages that
show a common historical origin:
Just as it appeared necessary to us, in composing the history of the wild

animals, to consider them in themselves one by one, and independently of
any genus, we equally believe, to the contrary, that it is necessary to . . .
extend the genera in the domestic animals . . . We have altered, modified,
and changed [the species] of the domestic animals. We have thus made
physical and real genera, very different from those metaphysical and
arbitrary genera, which exist only in thought. These physical genera are in
reality composed of all the species that we have manipulated, modified,
and changed; but since all these species, variously altered by the hand of
man, have only one common and8 single origin in nature, the entire genus
must form only a single species.4
Likewise, a 'family' of organisms was no longer to be equated with the

Linnaean Order, as was customary among his contemporaries, but rather
with a larger group of species united by historical descent:
In the dog the species is perhaps the less noble, because it appears to draw
near to that of the wolf, the fox and the jackal, so that one can regard them
as degenerated branches of the same family.49
As Buffon developed his reflections on the meaning of the taxonomic

system in a diffuse way in key articles of the Histoire naturelle des quadrupedes,
it cannot be maintained that his argument is fully transparent. It is highly
confusing, for example, that Buffon makes no particular discrimination
between category designations like 'family' and 'genus', which other
taxonomists of the period kept quite distinct.5° It is also never clear
whether Buffon holds 'genera' to be superior or subordinate to 'species'.51
Generally it seems that he broadened the boundaries of his 'real and
physical' species to encompass within it subordinate 'degenerations' into
taxa at the family, genus, variety, and race level. On one hand, following
the Leibnizian tradition we have described, the very reality of time was
constituted by the continuous succession of individuals which compose the
great and enduring natural species; as Buffon writes, in what has appeared
an enigmatic passage,
An individual, of whatever species it might be, is nothing in the universe .. .

The species are the sole beings of Nature, perpetual beings, as ancient and
as permanent as it is. Best to determine them, we must no longer consider
them as a collection or a series of similar individuals, but as a whole,
independent of number, independent of time, a whole always living, always
the same. A whole which has been counted as one in the works of the
creation. . . . A day, a century, an era, all the portions of time, do not make
a part of its duration. Time itself is only relative to the individuals, to beings
with a fleeting existence. But that of the species being constant, their
permanence makes duration, and their difference its number. . . .
In the torrent of time which brings in, carries along, and absorbs all
the individuals of the universe, [man] finds constant species, invariable
Nature. 52
Yet there also were complex networks of subordinate historical

groups within these large structures, which Buffon saw as forming distin-
guishable grades of genealogical and material relationship. As he wrote

in a text almost contemporary with that just quoted:
[There is] . . . a more ancient degeneration from time immemorial, which
appears to be made in each family, or if one wishes, in each genus under
which one can comprehend the neighbouring and slightly different species.
In the terrestrial animals, we only have a few isolated species which, like
that of man, form at the same time a species and genus. . . . All the others
would appear to form families in which one ordinarily observes a principal
and common stem, from which they seem to be different branches. . . .
Under this point of view, the horse, the zebra and the ass are all three of
the same family. If the horse is the stem or the principal trunk, the zebra
and the ass will be its collateral branches.53
From this there emerged not a picture of logically ordered groups in some
kind of rational subordination to each other, but rather a set of different-
sized grades of genealogical and historical relationship which ultimately
disclosed an interwoven network of biological lineages, interconnecting
and interweaving with one another in a vast tapestry. As he expressed this
vision in his article on 'Flightless birds' of 1770,
Nature deployed in all its extension presents an immense tableau to us, in
which all the orders of beings are each represented by a chain which
sustains a continuous series of objects so close and so similar to one another,
that their differences would be difficult to grasp. This chain is not a simple
thread extended only in length, but is a large web or almost a network,
which at intervals casts out side branches in order to unite with the network
of another order. 54
In this summary discussion of some complex and salient points, my
intention has not been to attempt to show the complex development of
Buffon's taxonomic thought, or the critical interplay of both theoretical
and empirical components in its maturation; my aim has rather been
more general, to show the intimate connexion of the Leibnizian distinction
between the abstract and real foundations for concepts and Buffon's
taxonomy, and then to illustrate how it was that this same distinction led
Buffon to a radical reinterpretation of the nature of taxonomic groups as
historical and material lineages. In the light of these distinctions, Buffon's
statements on the role of classification in natural history, which on the
surface have appeared inconsistent, vacillating, and paradoxical, are to
be seen as part of a consistent programme re-orienting natural history.
What Buffon considered to be 'abstract' ordering of nature, best exempli-
fied by the Systema naturae of his great Swedish contemporary Linnaeus,
was to be replaced with an inquiry into the real, as opposed to the ideal
world. The phenomenal being of the real world consisted of Wolff's 'series
of finite beings, either simultaneous and coexistent, »r successive, and
linked to one another'. How this revolutionary conclusion re-entered the
German tradition forms our next topic of inquiry.
IV
If Buffon made a critical historical interpretation of taxonomic groups
in the Historie naturelle, it is also evident that in this he effectively placed
himself in opposition to a growing consensus among working taxonomists
of the eighteenth century that the key to the 'natural system' lay not in
historical genesis and the material relationship of organisms, but rather
in a system based on total resemblance in morphological characters. This
thesis, given an epistemological justification in the last works of John
Ray,55 attained the status of a widespread inquiry by the late eighteenth
century, building upon Linnaeus' conviction that this overall affinity of
structures, the habitus, was one key to the enigmatic problem of the higher
relations of plants and animals.56
Through the further elaboration and exploration of this thesis in the
works of such prominent leaders of eighteenth-century taxonomy as
Bernard and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Michel Adanson, and Albrecht
von Haller,57 the concern with this 'total habitus' worked against Buffon's
search for a unified taxonomic system based not on morphology, but on
genealogy and reproduction. Adanson, for example, explicitly rejected
Buffon's conclusions without comprehending their foundation, and
remarked that the system based on overall resemblance '. . . differs totally
from that pretended scale and filiation or succession of beings considered
as a degradation of one and the same genus. . . .'58
Even more surprisingly, Marie Louis Daubenton, Buffon's colla-
borator on the Historie naturelle des quadruples, advocated a taxonomy
based on total morphological resemblance over one based on historical
connexion almost from the beginning of their collaboration. This curious
divergence, whose general features have been penetratingly discussed by
Professor Paul Farber,59 comes out clearly in Daubenton's article 'Botany',
written in 1751 for Diderot's Encyclopedic The task of taxonomy, he
argued, is to 'fix distinct ideas' of the individual organisms, and then to
give these names which will aid in their recall. The key to the 'natural
order' was then grounded on a complete description of 'all the relations'
of resemblance, rather than on one concentrating on similarities in a single
part. 60
Because of this pre-existent concern of taxonomists, the entry of
Buffon's Histoire naturelle into Germany in the early 1750s presents something
of a paradox for the central thesis of this paper. German taxonomic
biology was, by 1750, much more firmly codified than French systematics.
In botanical classification, three names stood out prominently as syste-
matizers. The first, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (Bachmann), whose
Introductio generalis in rent herbariam of 1690 had established a simple and
coherent system of botanical classification based on the structure of the
flower, provided a system followed by Koenig (1696), Heucher (1711),
Gemeinhart (1725), Kramer (1728), Hebenstreit (1731), Hecker (1734)
6r
and Ludwig (i737)- And from Leyden's strong impact on medical
botany, the final system of John Ray, published in his Methodus plantarum
emendata et aucta of 1703, and forming the system by which the Leyden
gardens were replanted under Petrus Hotton, had been refracted through
Boerhaave and found limited adherence in the systems of Albrecht von
Haller (1742) and Lawrence Heister (1748).61 While Tournefort's
systematics appear to have been of only minor importance in German-
speaking circles, the botanical and zoological systematics of Linnaeus
and his disciples formed a new star in German taxonomy in the 1740s,
with the third edition of the Systema naturae appearing at Halle in 1740 in
a German-Latin text.63 To these prominent systematizers in botany could
be added the specifically zoological systems of Ray and Willughby,
De Geer, Artedi, and especially Linnaeus's opponent, Johann Klein.
The net effect of this well established but diverse taxonomic tradition
was, first, to reinforce the belief in German circles in the possibility of a
rigorous systematization of nature according to a hierarchy of logical
classes, and essential definition by the method of division. More critically,
it supported a belief that the key to the 'natural system', was intimately
connected with morphological characters, whether this meant construct-
ing classifications on the basis of a single characteristic, deemed 'essential',
such as the reproductive parts of the organism, or systems based on the
overall affinity of multiple parts forming the habitus.
All this served to work against any development of Buffon's historici-
zation of the taxonomic system, especially since there was no compre-
hension of the epistemological dimensions of his distinction between the
'abstract' and 'real' systems. 64 This is manifest in the commentaries that
the entry of Buffon's Histoire naturelle engendered in German circles.
The fundamental reviews and commentaries, the published reception of
Buffon's work, concentrated on his cosmological, geological, and general
biological theory, particularly his account of generation. 65 His analysis
of the role of taxonomy in biology and the radical implications of his
'physical' interpretation of taxonomic groups were either ignored,
attacked, or misunderstood. In his lengthy prefaces to the German
translation of the first three volumes of the Historie naturelle,66 Albrecht
von Haller, professor of medicine at Gottingen, whose own reputation as
a systematic botanist was by this date well established, only indirectly
took up Buffon's polemic against Linnaean taxonomy, in the context of
an important discussion of the value of hypotheses in natural science.
While generally supporting Buffon's right to make conjectures in biology
and cosmology against the positivism he saw rampant in the wake of
Newton, Haller turned the tables on Buffon by treating the development
of rational systematics from Cesalpino onwards as itself a legitimate
application of useful conjecture and hypothesis.67
A more detailed discussion of Buffon's arguments on taxonomy and
the meaning of taxonomic groups is to be found in the copious notes
appended to the first three German volumes of the Histoire naturelle by
Abraham Kastner, professor of mathematics in Leipzig, and translator
of at least two of these three volumes. Although Kastner did on occasion
note an influence of Leibniz in Buffon's biological thought, he clearly failed
to see the Leibnizian epistemological foundation of the argument against
Linnaean taxonomy, and consequently could only interpret it as an
irrational attack against the ordering of nature. His general exasperation
was most extensively developed in a long note to Daubenton's article on
the classification of the quadrupeds, where Daubenton had for once
endorsed Buffon's sentiments as expressed in the Premier discours:
. . . The groundless and offensive judgments concerning taxonomic systems

[Methoderi] . . ., which are so extensively dispersed and repeated ad nauseam,
amount to nothing as soon as one reminds oneself that a taxonomic system
is supposed to be an index to the works of nature, [and] that one can be a
more convenient arrangement of an index than another. But it is at all
times better to have a bad index in a large book, than none at all. . . . The
accounts of [Linnaeus's] students on plants, fish, and so forth, prove that
he has instructed them to regard nature in a way other than only and
uniquely according to artificial taxonomic systems. If Messrs Buffon and
Daubenton had not seen these essays [Proberi], then they should not have
condemned people whose procedures were so completely unknown to
them. . . . Botanists have long talked of a natural system [Methode der
Natur], which is very much to be preferred to the artificial [systems]
although not for the beginner, and of which Mr Haller has given admirable
essays in his work on the Swiss plants.68
Concerning Buffon's more general argument concerning the two

kinds of 'truth', and the preference of 'real' to 'abstract' knowledge,
Kastner again failed to comprehend Buffon's argument. The separation
of mathematics from natural history he considered completely mistaken,
citing the fact that without the superstructure of Kepler's mathematics,
'Newton's physical concepts would certainly not have been formula ted'. 6 9
And the attempt to separate 'mathematical' and 'physical' truth he
considered generally incomprehensible.?0
This initial reception of Buffon's taxonomic philosophy by two of
the most prominent scientific figures of the period seems to set the general
pattern for its reception in Germany into the 1770s. Reviews of successive
volumes ignored such things as Buffon's species concept, and concentrated
on other aspects of his work. On occasions when notice was taken of his
classificatory philosophy, it was generally seen as misplaced criticism of
Linnaean taxonomy. 71
This picture was, however, to alter significantly after 1770, and this
shift in attention centred particularly on the relevance of Buffon's ideas
on a 'physical' meaning of the taxonomic system to a growing crisis in
Enlightenment anthropology. The central issue in anthropological theory

of the period concerned the status of man in the growing taxonomic system-
atization of nature, and the further consequences of the inclusion of man
in a fundamentally zoological order of the world. From the first
edition of his Systema naturae, Linnaeus had triggered the problem by his
inclusion of man among the Quadrupeda in the order Anthropomorpha,
along with the apes and sloths. In this taxonomy, man had formed a
separate genus, Homo, with four varieties, European, Asian, American,
and African, distinguished on the basis of colour. 7*
A polygenetic explanation of these varieties—the thesis that the
different varieties of men formed distinct species of separate origin—had
been offered as a possibility since the sixteenth century, and more recently
had been reaffirmed by figures as influential as Voltaire and David
Hume. 72 But BufFon's explicit and influential restatement of the inter-
breeding criterion in 1749 had, it seemed, effectively ended the career of
the polygenetic theory. 73
In the 1760s, however, significant challenges to this unity of the
human species reopened on several fronts. In the tenth edition of the
Systema naturae, published in Stockholm in 1758, Linnaeus split the genus
Homo into two distinct species, Homo sapiens, which included the four
earlier varieties, and Homo troglodytes, composed of a synthesis of travellers'
tales of the orang-utan. Through the next two decades the Linnaean
Systema included in and removed from the genus Homo a curious array of
higher primates and semi-mythical creatures allegedly seen in remote
parts of the world. 74 Buffon himself complicated the issue considerably
when he apparently weakened the interbreeding criterion in his articles
of 1766 on the 'Nomenclatures of apes' and the 'Degeneration of animals'.
In these, which both appeared in German translation in 1772, Buffon
openly argued for the fertility of mules, and in the former article he even
suggested that viable hybrid crosses between apes and Africans had taken
place. 75
Such apparent inconsistency readily provided arguments by which
the Scottish jurist and moral philosopher, Henry Home (Lord Kames)
was able to reassert the polygenetic theory with renewed vigour in his
Six sketches on the history of man of 1774, a work translated into German and
published in Leipzig in the same year. In the first part of this influential
work, Kames raised an essentially taxonomic argument. The divisions
that could be made in mankind showed, according to Kames, an analogy
not to simple varieties of a single species, as Linnaeus had persistently
maintained in the case of Homo sapiens, but to fully distinct species. On
the principle of analogy, he argued that the divisions of man showed the
constancy of character and of geographical localization of distinct species.
The 'highly artificial' definition of a species in terms of BufFon's inter-
breeding criterion was considered by Kames to have been refuted by
Buffon himself in his last articles, and hence could not take precedence
over his strong grounds for prefering a purely morphological criterion.76
The entry of Immanuel Kant into this discussion in the 1770s was
crucial for the establishment, clarification, and amplification of the
taxonomic concepts originally developed by BufFon. Unlike the other
main writers on these questions in German biology, Kant came to the
issue as one deeply grounded in the intricacies of the Leibniz-WolfF
philosophy, particularly as refracted through the writings of Wolff's
disciple, Alexander Baumgarten, well known to be Kant's original
starting point in philosophy. And he also brought to the problem of
man's place in nature a profound concern for the fundamental epistemo-
logical questions which had occupied Buffon in the Premier discours.
Kant's concern with biological subjects in general, and taxonomy in
particular, was a result of a course in physical geography that he had
initiated as a Privatdocent in 1757, and which he was to teach regularly for
the next forty years. Kant's close awareness of Buffon's Natural history
from the early 1750s is evident in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theone
des Himmels of 1755, 77 and his course in physical geography was primarily
based on the works of Johan Lulof, Bernard Varenius, and Buffon. 78
As an integral part of this course, he proposed in his prospectus to treat
in a summary way man, and also the animals, minerals, and plants,
following what he considered a '. . . naturlichen Ordnung der Klassen'.79
Judging from the surviving collations and syntheses of the manu-
scripts and lecture notes for Kant's physical geography course, which
date from rather late in his career, the biological sections began with a
treatment of man in terms of his geographical distribution, and the
correlation of his characteristics with climate. 80 Following the unorthodox
arrangement of Buffon's natural history, the discussion of man was then
followed by a survey of the domestic and economically useful animals;
the plants were similarly arranged in accordance with their economic and
utilitarian value. But there were also important differences between
Kant's treatment of animals and plants and Buffon's: the quadrupeds were
subdivided, in partial agreement with Linnaeus's system, on the basis of
differences in organs of locomotion; and Kant treated these in terms of
main Geschlechter, which Buffon never did with the quadrupeds. 81
In 1775, however, Kant scheduled as the topic of the summer half of
this course a discussion of the races of man. Unold has claimed that this
interest was generated by Kames's revival of the polygeneticist thesis,82
and indeed, to judge from the report of the budding zoologist Johann
Blumenbach in the same year, the polygeneticist option, with Kames's
name figuring prominently, was being '. . . much discussed in these days'83
—at least in Gottingen. In the prospectus announcing his course which
was published two years later in Johann EngeV s Philosophiefur die Welt, Kant
showed a profound reorientation in his approach to the race issue,

altering the format that had previously governed the physical geography
course, which had apparently followed a descriptive analysis. 84
From his earliest scientific writings, Kant had implicitly distinguished
atemporal descriptive and taxonomic analysis from the historical and
genetic approach; and similarity of Kant's general point to much the same
distinction in Buffon's works seems more than fortuitous. But in his 1777
paper, Kant achieved a clarity far greater than that of Buffon, with his
explicit distinction between JVaturgeschichte, meaning the genetic history
of nature, and Naturbeschreibung, the description of nature. 85 From
other writings of his mature period, it is clear that Kant explicitly
based this distinction on his revolutionary re-analysis of the whole
question of time and space, which was one of the keystones of the emer-
gence of his mature philosophy around 1770. With this new basis, Kant
was able to achieve a significantly greater rigour of analysis than Buffon
ever achieved, and with this made a rigorous distinction of taxonomic
concepts as applied in the domain of Naturbeschreibung from their function
in Maturgeschichte. To summarize briefly a large and complex issue that
demands separate study in its own right, Kant had originally embraced
the Leibniz-Wolff analysis of space and time, and the parallel distinction
of'real' and 'abstract' orders.86 There was, of course, a profound reorienta-
tion of Kant's perspectives on these topics around 1700, when Kant's
'critical' philosophy emerged, which involved as one component some-
thing of a synthesis of the Newtonian concept of 'abstract' and 'absolute'
time and space with Leibniz's and Wolff's relational concept. For Kant,
Newtonian time and space moved to a pure a priori ground of all sensible
intuition, while the empirical meaning of time and space was defined in
terms of the succession and coexistence of bodies.87
The bearing of this new reorientation on the problem of taxonomy is
to be seen most clearly in the introduction to his lectures on physical
geography. 88 There Kant indicated three kinds of inquiry into 'natural
history' in a broad sense. The first of these approached Nature in terms
of a logical ordering of concepts, and this is where he placed Linnaean
taxonomy, much as Buffon had done. Thus, to divide the quadrupeds in
terms of variations in their means of locomotion, as he in fact did in his
physical geography lectures, was to make a logical division '. . . which 1
make in my head'. 8 9 But beyond this were two other inquiries, now
governed by the forms of pure intuition, space and time.
The division of the objects of knowledge [Erkenntnisse] according to concepts

is logical division. That according to time and space however is a physical
division. By means of the first we obtain a natural system (Systema naturae),
as, for example, that of Linnaeus. Through the latter means on the other
hand, we obtain a geographical description of nature. 9°
As Kant developed this point, it became clear that there really was a
bifurcation in this last concept. This 'physical' division could proceed in
two ways: the first analyzed organisms in the domain of their spatial
relations, treating them by locale, habitat, and geographical distribution.
This was where the physical geography course typically remained. But
just as the concept of time took precedence over the concept of space in
Kant's philosophy,^ so this geographical description could be subsumed
under a more comprehensive historical and genetic account of nature:
The history of nature contains the multiplicity of geographical objects, as
it has been in different times, but not how it is now at the same time.
Because in this case it would be a description of nature. But if the events
of collected nature, as they have been constituted through all times, are
brought forth, we are supplied for the first time with a natural history
properly so called. 9*
Then, employing precisely the terminology that was codified in German

natural history in the translations of Buffon's Natural history, Kant gave as
an example the conception of the different races of dogs or horses as having
come from a single stock or Stamm.K And it was to this last kind of inquiry,
the 'true philosophy' as Kant terms it, that he seemed to give the highest
value. 94
When we turn to Kant's 1775 paper on the races of man, which first
gave public expression to these distinctions and applied them to the
concrete problem of the unity of the human species, we can begin to see
the direction Kant's ideas were leading in taxonomic biology. In the
introduction to this paper, Kant indicated clearly that he understood
Buffon's concept of species to be one intimately connected with what he
called a history of nature:
In the animal kingdom the division of nature into genera [Gattungeri] and
species [Arten] is grounded on the general law of reproduction, and the
unity of the genus is nothing else than the unity of the generative force,
which is considered as generally active for a determined manifold of
animals. Thus, the Buffonian rule—that animals which can generate
fertile young and which might show differences in form [Gestalt], belong to
one and the same physical genus [Physichen Gattung]—can properly be
applied only as the definition of a natural genus [Naturgattung] of animals
generally, to differentiate it from all logical genera [Schulgattungen\.9S
Kant's point here—distinguishing with Buffon between a 'physical'

genus, based on the ability to reproduce fertile offspring, and a purely
'logical' genus—shows a now explicit debt to Buffon. 96 And as Kant
continued his argument, the claim again followed Buffon: that given
such a 'physical' meaning of the group, the key to classification in the
history of nature is not character resemblance, but the recognition of
groups united by the historical unity of the stem:
The logical division [of taxonomists] proceeds by classes according to
similarities; the natural division considers them according to the stem
[Stdmme], and divides animals according to genealogy, and with reference
to reproduction. One produces an arbitrary system for the memory, the
other a natural system for the understanding [Verstand]. The first has only
the intention of bringing creation under titles; the second intends to bring
it under laws. 97
The exact language of this last passage bears close attention. As

Kant explained in the Critique ofpure reason, which was taking shape at just
this time, to bring the multiplicity of phenomena under the understanding
was to subsume experience under the categories, giving it an a priori
necessity and synthetic unity under the epistemological laws brought to
experience by the mind. To claim that only a natural or 'physical' species
or genus accomplishes this was to put it on an epistemological footing
wholly different from mere classificatory grouping based on character
similarity and difference.98
As Kant developed this essay, his argument was that in 'natural
historical' terms, the necessary unity and law-like character of the 'natural
genus' could only be grasped if it was understood as having a unitary
origin from a common historical stock. The polygeneticists were refuted
on two levels: firstly, in their recognition of several species of men, they
had recognized only 'logical' divisions based on morphological similarities
and differences; secondly, by postulating several separate historical
creations they had failed to seek a unification of knowledge, which must
always be based on the principle of the economy of explanatory causes.99
With a rigour lacking in Buffon, Kant then developed the distinctions
to be made within a common stem in terms of degrees of genaealogical
relationship:
A genus of animals [Thiergattung], which has a common stem, does not

contain under it different species [Arteri] since this would mean differences
of origin. Rather, if these differences are hereditary, the divergent [groups]
are called 'degenerations' [Abartungen] . . .
Beneath the degenerations . . . those which maintain themselves with
constancy over long generations through all transplantations to other regions,
and also produce intermediate offspring in interbreeding with other
degenerations of the same stem, are called 'races'. Those which in all
transplantations preserve the constancy of their 'degeneration', but do
not produce intermediate offspring in interbreeding, are called 'sports'
[Spielarteri]. Those, however, which preserve this constancy only generally
are called 'varieties'. On the other hand, the degeneration which produces
intermediate offspring, but which in time is obliterated by transplantation,
is called a 'local kind' [besonderer Schlag].100
The human variants were thus defined as 'races' in this classification:

they showed intermediacy of character when crossed, and the unity of a
common stem. Kant then postulated that all men were derived from an
original stem-form originating in the upper latitudes of Asia, from which
the various races arose by a process of historical degeneration.101
The historical unity of the 'natural species' was assured for Kant by
a modified preformationism. Each species had a determinate number of
hereditary 'germs' [Keimen] preexistent within the physical species, which
could either be developed or suppressed in response to environmental
conditions. And supporting the species as a whole, acting almost like
Buffon's moule interieure, was an organizing potential [Anlage] which
determined how the parts of the organism related to one another in a
specific way.102
What is crucial is that the central point of Kant's essay—the profound
difference between a classification seen as a logical description of nature,
and that seen as a '. . . physical system for the understanding'—was based
on an epistemological point on which empirical evidence had little bearing.
The argument centred on a suggested procedure for obtaining genuine
knowledge of nature in its physical connexions. But this point, first applied
to natural history by Buffon and now made more rigorous and specific by
Kant, still lacked adequate development. The Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
which alone was to make full sense of this and justify it rigorously, was still
four years in the future when Kant's essay was published in 1777. Not
unexpectedly, the initial reviews of the paper showed a lack of compre-
hension of these key points.I03
That Johann Blumenbach, the rising Gottingen naturalist, anthro-
pologist, and theoretician of biology, who was to become almost a German
'Cuvier' for a generation of zoologists, failed to grasp the point of Kant's
distinction is more significant. Blumenbach had opened his long career in
natural history and anthropology in 1776 with the publication of his
inaugural dissertation which examined fully the varieties of the human
species. Although there is no direct evidence, it seems likely that Blumen-
bach would have heard of Kant's paper on the subject when it was
published only a year later in a well known periodical. Yet it appears that
even after Blumenbach had become acquainted with Kant's distinc-
tions,I04 he did not alter his previously established taxonomic principles.I05
A point made implicitly in Blumenbach's dissertation of 1776, but quite
explicitly in his influential Handbuch der Naturgeschichte of 1779, is that he
saw the key to the natural system not in historical filiation and temporal
connexion, but in the total relation of characters, the so-called habitus,
that we have already noted in French taxonomy.106 In Blumenbach, this
principle received a theoretical grounding in his own definition of
Naturgeschichte, a concept identical neither with the Naturbeschreibung that
Kant identified with Linnaean natural history, nor yet with the
Naturgeschichte sought by Kant. Blumenbach was more explicitly Baconian:
The Linnaean Systema naturae, and similar inventories of our modern flora
and fauna, have their great utility, but scarcely the appeal to inspire a
young man to make himself in some measure familiar with nature and the
knowledge of its creatures. It has, for that reason, been my intention to
unite together in these pages not only the general principles [Grundsdtze] of
natural history [Naturgeschichte], but also the most suggestive [ones] from
the history of the most remarkable creatures in particular. I agree com-
pletely with the noble conception [erhabnen Begrifferi] of a compendium,
which Bacon of Verulam, one of the wisest of men, delimited—namely,
that it was supposed to be the essential totality [kernige Inbegriff] of the most
important truths of a science, which should serve as the pure, nourishing
well-spring for the present, and still as a respected, document for record of
literature in I0the future, however far the science may have advanced in
distant time. 7
The consequences of this conception of Naturgeschichte are manifest

in Blumenbach's actual approach to the classification of organisms in
the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte and in his other writings. Morphological
resemblance, not genealogical connexion, was the key to the natural
system. In company with Adanson, the Jussieus, and the other leading
taxonomists of the late Enlightenment, Blumenbach saw the use of a
large number of morphological resemblances as the key. As he wrote when
he introduced his revised classification of the Mammalia, systems based
on a single part are only artificial:
We have thus endeavoured to remedy this deficiency and to sketch out a

natural system of the mammals, which, according to our concept of the
natural method, we have seen [gesehri] not in a single abstracted character,
but in all the other characters together, in the whole habitus of the animal.
Thus the animals, which resembled one another in nineteen structures,
and only differed in the twentieth, have nevertheless been grouped
together, and this twentieth character might now be the teeth, claws, or
perhaps another part.108
Of course the force of Kant's precise distinctions could not really

be understood in the absence of their epistemological foundations, only
developed in the Kritik der reinen Vemunft, which he was preparing around
this time, and which was first published in 1781. Kant's initial paper on
the topic of race was viewed against what many German scientists saw as a
rising tide of evidence against the interbreeding criterion, from which
they increasingly drew the consequence that a morphological criterion for
species, with its implicit polygeneticist consequences, was the only one
viable.10?
When he raised the issue of race in 1777, Kant had considered himself
but a novice in anthropology and natural history;110 and until 1781 he
seems to have remained occupied with working out the first Kritik. How-
ever, the reception given by his contemporaries to his ideas on race raised
questions which seem never to have been far from his mind, and in 1785
and 1788 Kant again returned to the topic, this time armed with the
detailed 'critical' epistemology.
The intention of Kant's 1785 paper was to add precision to his
concept of the unity of the human lineage from the standpoint of Natur-
geschichte, and to make still more clear the distinction between this concept
and any conclusions that might be drawn from a morphological taxonomy
residing only in the domain of Naturbeschreibung: those who have split
mankind into different species [Arten] have failed to see that the inter-
fertility of the different races proves not that they form several nominal
species of nature-description, but that they constitute a real species of
natural history:
Animals, whose differences from each other are so great that it is necessary
to attribute their existence to so many separate creations, could, to be sure,
belong to the some nominal genus [Nominalgattung], classified according to
certain similarities, but never to a real genus [Realgattung], in which at least
the possibility of derivation from a single pair is required. To determine
the latter, however, is the proper business of the history111of nature, while
the describer of nature can be satisfied with the former.
From the standpoint of natural history, taxonomic species must often

be considered only as races within a common stem:
In the history of nature, which is concerned only with generation and

descent, the species [Art] and genus [Gattung] are not to be distinguished.
This distinction occurs only in the description of nature, which depends
purely on the comparison of characters. What is called species in the latter,
must more often be called only a race in the former."2
In 1788 Kant was forced to return to the topic after his 1785 paper
had been sharply criticized by Johann Georg A. Forster (1754-1794) in
two papers in the Teutsche Merkur for 1786. Georg Forster, the son of the
geographer, ethnographer, and natural historian Johann R. Forster, was
by then a professor of natural history at the Collegium Carolinium in
Kassel, and a prominent naturalist in contact with the main leaders of
German biology; "3 and as one of the editors of a journal which contained
a detailed, if critical, discussion of Kantianism in I785,11* he was also in a
position to be more than superficially acquainted with Kant's general
philosophy.
It is evident, however, that Forster was unable to follow the basis of
Kant's arguments on the race question, and his own approach was
grounded on a fundamentally morphological approach."5 He noted that
Kant's paper had forced him to reflect more extensively on the general
issue of how races and varieties are to be distinguished, and focused
initially on what he saw as Kant's chief error—the belief that the empirical
issue concerning the poly- or monogenetic character of the human group
could be resolved by purely philosophical and epistemological considera-

tions. In opposition, he cited the serious travel literature suggesting signi-
ficant differences among different endemic human groups. And he felt
particularly that the empirical evidence concerning the relations of
Europeans and blacks was so ambiguous that polygeneticism could not
be excluded, and further experience was required to test whether Voltaire's
thesis of a separate origin [Stammvater] of Europeans and blacks was
tenable." 6
But the heart of Forster's attack on Kant was directed at what he
saw as the fundamental problem—the distinction between Natur-
beschreibung and Naturgeschichte, and the apparent epistemological primacy
given to the latter. This was raised in the context of the problem of
deciding whether whites and blacks form separate species:
If one separates natural science, with Herr Kant, into nature-description
and a history of nature (a division which I can indeed scarcely admit
when both are always united and treated as parts of one whole), then it
might appear that the describer of nature can better do something with
the question. To be sure, Herr Kant appears to admit each and every
difference of character [that] would allow the describer of nature to
constitute a species [Art]. I cannot on this give a wholly satisfactory
answer, because the excellent author who dealt with [behandelte] taxonomic
science, Linnaeus, has written in Latin. His divisions are called classes,
orders, genera, species, [and] varieties. Now it appears to me that varieties
[are] to be denned always through changeable, accidental characters;
hence it is admitted [that] one variety could pass into another. If Herr
Kant wants rather to speak, in these terms, of species [Art], rather than
varieties, then, it is only a confusion of terms, about which one can easily
acquaint oneself. On the other hand, genus [Gattung], if species should be
thus translated, requires in the Linnacan sense constancy of characters.
In the history of nature, the situation must be rather different [muss es sich
anders verhalteri] if, as Herr Kant asserted, we are here concerned only with
procreation and descent [Erzeugung undden Abstamm]. But in this respect the
history of nature might indeed be a science for gods alone, and not for men:
who is capable of demonstrating the genealogical tree [Stammbaum] of so
much as one single variety up to its genus, if it does not arise from another
nearly in front of our eyes?"7
Kant could only reply by concluding that Forster had based his
argument on a '. . . misunderstanding of the principle from which I
proceed'—presumably meaning the whole critical philosophy." 8
Kant's answer to Forster focused on the alleged impossibility of a
Naturgeschichte, in Kant's sense of an inquiry into stem-relations and origins.
To this Kant replied that if science is not to be confined to mere atemporal
description and classification (and Forster is accused of inconsistency here,
in his own concern with the origin of races), then a rational and defensible
distinction could be made, which would separate morphology-based,
non-historical taxonomy of the Linnaean variety from a search into the
historical unity of mankind as revealed by reproductive relations."9
With a clarity lacking in all other discussions of these issues, Kant grounded
this distinction on the legitimacy of two different aspects of inquiry into
nature. One was the atemporal 'theoretical' view (presumably, as the
Kritik develops, under the guidance of the understanding), and the other
a synthesizing perspective grounded in ideas of reason;120 this separated
concepts into two domains, corresponding to Naturbeschreibung and
Naturgeschichte or, as Kant now termed these inquiries to avoid inevit-
able confusions, Physiographie and Physiogonie.121 Although this point is,
in the 1788 paper, only implicit, it seems clear from the Kritik that the
one would be concerned with the objects given in intuition under the
categories, and the other would unite them in groups under the idea of
descent from a common stem. As he wrote in the Kritik both in 1781 and
in 1787:
The first law [of the unification of species under original genera] keeps us
from resting satisfied with a multiplicity of different original genera
[Gattungeri], and bids us pay due regard to homogeneity; the second [law of
the division of genera into species] in turn imposes a check upon this
tendency towards unity, and insists that before we proceed to apply a
universal concept to individuals, we distinguish subspecies [Unterarten]
within it. The third law combines these two laws by prescribing that
even amidst the utmost multiplicity we observe homogeneity in the gradual
transition from one species [Species] to another, and thus recognize a
relationship between the different branches, as ail arising from one stem
[Stamrri].1"
The perspective of Naturgeschichte, it would seem, resolved the tension

between the 'Linnaean' and 'Buffonian' perspectives by providing a
principle of unification which could continually direct and, more im-
portantly, reform the morphological taxonomies of Naturbeschreibung.
Forster had failed to see the distinction between the concept of a race,
which is purely in the domain of Naturgeschichte, and that of Linnaean
variety, which belongs to Naturbeschreibung:
What is a race [Rasse] ? The word has no place in a system of nature-
description, and presumably the entity [Ding] is itself not generally in
nature. The concept alone which this expression designates is fully [gar
wohf] grounded in the reason [ Vernunft] of every observer of nature, who
brings in thought a unity of cause [Ursache]—and specifically a cause
which is considered to originate in the stem of the genus [Gattung],
rather than in the concept of the genus—to a self-transmitting charac-
teristic of different interbreeding animals. I23
As this quotation would seem to suggest, Kant had in one crucial
respect departed from the position underlying his 1777 paper, which
ultimately placed him at some variance with the Buffonian distinction
of an 'abstract' morphological approach to taxonomy, and a 'real and
physical' system grounded on the immanence of time. Instead of granting
Naturgeschichte the greatest epistemological certitude, as Buffon had
argued, Kant split the two largely along the constitutive-regulative border
that runs through the Kritik. The concepts of Naturgeschichte were moved
out of the domain of certain knowledge (in Kant's technical sense of the
term, confined to the categorized experience of the understanding) and
were now placed among the regulative ideas of pure reason. But Buffon's
basic claim, that there was a way of viewing the taxonomic problem in
terms of history and genealogy, rather than in terms of morphology and
character-similarity, remained intact. In Kant's analysis, such a view was
a necessary implication of the general thesis that science requires unifying
regulative principles for its very activity, and thus could never remain
in the domain of Forster's atemporal taxonomy:
Whether there really is such a kinship in the human species [Menschen-
gattung], must be decided by observations which reveal the unity of descent
[Abstatnmung]. And here it is clearly seen that one must be guided by a
determinate principle merely to observe, in order to pay attention to that
which might give information on descent, and not merely on character-
similarity; because here we are concerned [zu tun haberi] with a problem of
the history of nature, and not of the description of nature and mere
taxonomic naming.
. . . Of the variation of the original stem, there is no more certain sign
than the impossibility of producing fertile offspring through the inter-
breeding of two different human hereditary groups [Menschenabteilungeri].™*
V
Kant's three papers on race, supported by the epistemological
foundation of the Critique of pure reason, showed, albeit rather diffusely, a
direction for a significant reorientation of taxonomic inquiry. Kant refined,
clarified, and deepened Buffon's distinction between the 'abstract' and
'physical' meaning of taxonomic groups, and clearly related this distinc-
tion to two conceptually separable programmes of research into natural
history. On the one hand, Kant asserted the importance of inquiry into
the reproductive and genealogical relations of organisms, without
following Buffon in his polemic against Linnaean or other systematic
treatments of organisms. These remained, for Kant, perfectly valid and
even necessary analyses of the biological domain, but they were inquiries
which must be unified and guided by reason in its regulative function,
thus subsuming them under another, genealogical, inquiry. Not only
were the splitting tendencies of taxonomic systems checked, but the results
of such systems could also conceivably be reformed by the subsumption
of morphologically defined groups under 'natural' groups defined by a
community of historical ancestry. And by making a sharp separation
between concepts of taxonomic groups in the domains of NaturgeschichU
and Maturbeschreibung, Kant could distinguish, without the puzzling
metaphysical and epistemological confusions that might otherwise arise,
the 'natural-historical' meanings of species, genera, and other higher
categories from the logical-classificatory concepts derived from Aristotelian
and scholastic logic, which were the basis of the taxonomies of virtually
all the systematise of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A further consequence of Kant's position was that, from the standpoint
of the 'history of nature', there was a fundamental epistemological difference
between a 'natural' classification of organisms, and any kind of classifica-
tion for minerals, diseases, or chemical elements. This is a critical point,
for it was the assumption that these presented analogous situations that
continually directed the main current of biological systematics toward
purely morphological approaches to the 'natural system'. Kant claimed,
however, that the key lay in historical genesis: only in organic beings could
the plurality-unity tension be resolved by the idea of the derivation of
forms by generation from a common historical stem.
The degree to which Kant's reworking of Buffon's fundamental
insights was accepted in the German tradition of working taxonomists
can be illustrated by looking first at what we might consider a mainstream
tradition, as represented by Johann Blumenbach, and then by examining
what I will argue is the more creatively Kantian position subsequently
expounded by Kant's disciple Christoph Girtanner. The ambiguous
synthesis of aspects of both of these positions by Johann Karl Illiger, the
codifier of German taxonomy, will be the final topic of examination.
Although, as previously noted, Blumenbach had formulated his
initial views on taxonomy before encountering Kant's writings, he was
in many respects in a position to be well acquainted with Kant's mature
philosophical and scientific views; and particularly after the controversy
between Kant and his friend Georg Forster, he showed familiarity with
Kant's views on race."5 It seems clear, however, that the fundamental
distinction made both by Buffon and by Kant between a 'historical'
interpretation of the taxonomic system with a 'natural-historical' concept
of taxa, and the 'abstract' concepts of Linnaeus, was not comprehended
by Blumenbach, who cited Kant, but did not grant the epistemological
foundations for these distinctions.
This is manifest in Blumenbach's reflections on taxonomic issues that
emerged in the wake of the Forster-Kant controversy. In 1789, Blumen-
bach published a frequently-cited paper which took up certain dimensions
of the problem of definition of race being discussed by 'some contemporary
authors'—evidently Kant and Forster. In this paper, Blumenbach did
adopt some of Kant's terminological distinctions, and he rejected Forster's
scepticism about the historical Stamm. At the same time, however, he
failed fundamentally to come to terms with Kant's argument. The
question of the monogenetic or polygenetic origin of mankind was not to
be decided by fertile interbreeding, which for Kant had formed the

foundation of a 'physical' species, but rather by morphological similarity
and the principle of analogy. The solution was simply to take a non-
problematic domestic animal, whose unitary origin was undisputed,
determine the degree of difference between its different Spielarten, and then
make the similar comparison for human groups:
No naturalist, to my knowledge, has yet carried his scepticism so far as to

doubt the descent of the domestic swine from the wild boar . . . All of the
varieties [Varietdten] into which the animal has since degenerated belong,
with the European stem-race, to one and the same species [Gattung].
And since it will presently be shown that no bodily difference is found
in the human genus [Menschengeschlechte] (whether in regard to stature,
colour, or form of the skull, etc.) which one does not observe in similar
proportion also in the swine races, and while no one, for this reason,
would ever think to doubt that all these different [kinds] of pigs are still
merely sports [Spielarten] which have arisen through degeneration under
the action of climate, etc., this comparison will, I hope, serve to pacify
those doubters who, on account of those differences in the human 6genus,
have found it suitable to admit more than one species [Gattung]."
Blumenbach's failure, or unwillingness, to admit Kant's basic point

and adopt those distinctions that would make the use of such a principle
of morphological analogy to resolve the polygeneticist-monogeneticist
issue unnecessary, was to have significant ramifications.I27 While it is
clear from other writings that Blumenbach was always willing to admit
the interbreeding criterion as fundamental for the definition of biological
species until the early 1790s,128 the thesis of his 1789 paper became
increasingly important in his subsequent reflections. By the mid-1790s,
Blumenbach had developed his morphological perspective to the point
that his conclusions can only be considered to be at fundamental odds with
the basic thesis of the Buffon-Kant tradition.
This is made most evident in a long letter to Sir Joseph Banks dis-
cussing taxonomic concepts, which Blumenbach reprinted as the preface
to the greatly revised third edition of his De generis humani varietate nativa
of 1795. In this letter, Blumenbach noted that the discoveries of naturalists
like Banks who had attempted to apply 'artificial' taxonomic systems based
on similarities in a single essential part outside the confines of Europe had
decisively shown the defects of artificial systems.12 9 The alternative that
Blumenbach recommended only reemphasized the basically morphological
perspective he had endorsed in the 1770s:
. . . I think that it will be useful and profitable to students of zoology, to
give up [the system of Linnaeus] as very imperfect and liable to vast
exceptions, and to substitute for the artificial system one more natural,
deduced from the universal characteristics [habitum universum~\ of the
mammalia.
And when I found it was beyond all doubt that a natural system of
that kind was preferable to an artificial one, because it is of such use in
sharpening the judgment and assisting the memory, I applied myself all
the more to bring the class of mammalia into the scope of a natural system
of that kind . . .'3°
As an example of his reforms, Blumenbach then proposed in the letter a

minor revision of his earlier classification of mammals, resulting in an
important, but still non-radical, revision of Linnaeus's mature system.^1
In the body of the text of the De generis, Blumenbach explicitly took
up the concept of species as used in biology, and the related concepts of
'race' and 'variety'. Although he was by now familiar with Kant's three
papers on race, it is again clear that he either rejected, or did not fully
comprehend Kant's (and BufFon's) distinction between a morphological
and a historical concept of species. After summarizing the interbreeding
definition of species, which he indiscriminately attributed to John Ray,
Buffon, and Johann Frisch, he proceeded to argue that this was an
impractical criterion, particularly when applied to wild animals. Without
following Kant in identifying two meanings of species, Blumenbach made
more explicit his morphological definition as suggested in 1789: the question
of the unity or diversity of the species was to be resolved purely by the
principle of morphological analogy:
We say that animals belong to one and the same species, if they agree so
well in form and constitution that those things in which they do differ may
have arisen from degeneration. We say that those, on the other hand, are
of different species whose essential difference is such as cannot be explained
by the known sources of degeneration . . .'3*
While the practical fertility of such a principle to the working taxo-
nomist cannot be denied, it also illustrates that Kant's arguments were
not taking hold in at least one critical representative of the mainstream of
German zoology, despite congenial relations between Blumenbach and
Kant in the 1790s.'33 While Blumenbach appears to have adopted from
Kant the use of such terms as Rasse, he did not adopt the framework
upon which Kant's arguments rested. Not surprising, Blumenbach's
taxonomy remained throughout his writings strikingly constant and un-
affected by the currents we have traced. *34
In 1796, however, Christoph Girtanner's On the Kantian principle for
natural history appeared at Gottingen, and brought Kant's basic arguments
together in a coherent and synthetic way with dimensions of reigning
biological theory, and then generalized them into a comprehensive
programme for reform of the classification of all organisms in terms of
genealogical relationships.
Sandwiched as it was between his extensive medical, chemical, and
political writings of the 1790s, Girtanner's attempt to synthesize and
extend Kant's ideas explicitly in the direction of natural history was a

highly creative move, and one somewhat unexpected from Girtanner's
earlier work.J35 Nor had Girtanner ever corresponded with or met Kant;
he was apparently completely unknown to him until after the publication
of his 1796 treatise.r36 It is evident, however, that the work was the
product of several years of reflection, and his ability to develop Kant's
taxonomic insights would appear to be closely linked with his contact
with two of Kant's own disciples in the late 1780s. The first, Karl Reinhold
(1758-1823), a professor of philosophy at Jena, had in 1786 published an
influential exposition of Kant's philosophy in the Teutsche Merkur, with the
first of his 'Letters on the Kantian philosophy' appearing in the same
issue of the journal as Georg Forster's attack on Kant.'37 Girtanner is
said to have travelled to Jena to visit Reinhold to learn more about Kant's
philosophy some time before 1788, and he appears to have gained much
of his technical knowledge of Kantianism through Reinhold's exposi-
tions. J 3 8
Of perhaps even more immediate relevance is the second figure,
Johann Jachmann, who had served as Kant's amanuensis during the
late 1780s, at precisely the time that Kant was again reflecting on the
race issue.J39 As a medical student at Edinburgh from 1788-9, Jachmann
had been Girtanner's room-mate, and he was later his travelling com-
panion on the return trip to Germany, a journey which took them not
only to Paris at the height of the Revolution, but also to Gottingen.M0
This long and intimate association with two prominent Kantians
goes some way to explain why Girtanner should have diverted his interests
from medicine and chemistry to questions of natural history, physical
anthropology, and taxonomy. And unlike his former teacher Blumenbach,
Girtanner had a clear and concise grasp, with none of the usual confusions,
of Kant's fundamental distinction between concepts belonging to Natur-
beschreibung and those of Naturgeschichte.
From the start, Girtanner announced that his express purpose was to
generalize the 'wholly new direction' which Kant had opened up for
natural history with his three papers on race:
In long reflections on the Kantian foundation, I have found that its value
is not confined to the races of mankind, to which the famous philosopher
has applied it; rather, this1foundation is a general law, which can be applied
to all of organized nature. '*1
Girtanner's monograph began with a synthetic and systematic exposition

of Kant's basic arguments in the three papers on race and by a set of
explicit definitions which start the work, made fundamental the distinction
between the description of nature (Naturbeschreibung, Physiographie) which
dealt with nature in its contemporaneous relations, and the history of
nature (Naturgeschichte, Physiogonie), concerned with temporal and genetic
relationship:
The history of nature, in the philosophical sense, divides organized bodies
into lineages \Stamme\, according to their relationships of generation. It is
grounded on the unifying law of procreation. The unity of the species
[Gattung] lies in its unity of reproductive force. In this way a natural
system for the understanding is formed, a division of organized bodies
under laws, and particularly under the laws of the formative force
[Bildungstrieb].1**
The synthesis of the ideas of Kant and those of Blumenbach is evident

at many places in the treatise. But on the critical issue of the meaning of
the natural system, it is quite clear that Blumenbach's morphological
interpretation of the natural system had been replaced by one derived
from the Buffon-Kant lineage we have been following. Referring explicitly
to Blumenbach's use of the principle of morphological analogy as the
foundation of category definition, Girtanner remarked:
In the description of nature, organized bodies are divided, according to
the Linnaean system, into classes, orders, genera [Geschlechter], and species
[Arten]. This scholastic division, which is purely for the memory, brings
organized creatures under titles according to their similarity or according to
analogy. '43
But where Blumenbach had moved increasingly away from a conception

of the unity of species in terms of fertile reproduction, Girtanner reaffirmed
this as the critical sign to be employed for denning a physical species in the
Kantian sense of Naturgeschichte:
All animals or plants which generate fertile young with each other belong
to a physical species [physischen Gattung]. This is the great law of nature on
which the history of nature is grounded.
Organized bodies which belong to one and the same natural species,
are united to each other in a connected group [Verbindung] through their
capacity to reproduce, and have arisen from one stem.
Organized bodies which belong to the same artificial species are
united purely through a comparison of common characters. »44
Girtanner then discussed the concrete bearing of this for biological

taxonomy: after summarizing Linnaeus's classification, and Blumenbach's
modifications of it, and noting that the latter's groups were indeed the
best available, and useful for the writer of the history of nature, Girtanner
appealed for a new classification (Einteilung) of the animal kingdom:
The division of the animal kingdom which has been given here, and
which has been taken from the most famous describers of nature
[Maturbeschreibern], will likewise be useful for the historian of nature
[Geschichtschreiber] until, through exact observations, trials, and experi-
ments, the laws of reproduction are sufficiently known. Then, however, a
new division of the animal kingdom into classes, orders, species [Gattungeri],
races, sports [Spielarteri], and varieties must be undertaken, according to the
relationship of reproduction. '45
While he admitted that such a project would require perhaps another

century for its completion, the remainder of Girtanner's work was an
analysis of man, animals, and plants according to these distinctions within
their Naturgattungen and Stdmme. The main portion of the treatise was
devoted to an analysis of the variations in the unitary human natural
species, developed, following Kant, into a subordination of races, varieties,
sports, and local variants. Through a geographical analysis reminiscent
of Buffon's Degeneration of animals and Epochs of nature, and Zimmermann's
Geographical history, he traced the probable Urstamm of mankind back to a
stock originating in East Asia between 32 and 50 degrees of latitude, and
95 to 125 degrees of longitude.^
In his lengthy analysis of the human species, Girtanner surveyed
Kant's five races, and then the levels of varieties within each of these.
His intention was to connect their distribution and variation with the
temporal process of origin from a common stock, and the spread through-
out the world from their place of origin. In an eclectic synthesis of Kant's
preformationist theory of generation, based on pre-existent Keime and
Anlagen within the Stamm, which developed selectively under appropriate
environmental conditions, and Blumenbach's epigenetic theory, based
on the constructive power of the Bildungstrieb, Girtanner explained the
process of origin through the action of physical agents, which had led in
time to the formation of all the races and varieties of mankind.'47
He then surveyed more briefly the main mammals of economic
importance, exclusively in terms of their presumed stem-relations and of
groups denned by reproductive community. A brief treatment of the birds
followed, and then an analysis of the economically important plants by
Stamm and Rassen, arguing here that the '. . . Bildungstrieb follows the same
laws in the plant kingdom as in the animal kingdom'.X4»
Except in the case of man, Girtanner's treatment of his topic is
frustratingly brief and non-specific; he readily acknowledged the enormity
of the task of analyzing anew all the organic realm in terms of these stem-
relations.^ But the conscious articulation in the work of a consistent
programme for a 'Kantian' reform of natural history transcended these
limitations, and this new orientation was evident to Girtanner's con-
temporaries. A lengthy review and summary in the prestigious Gottingische
Anzeigen noted this clearly:
The current active concern of philosophers with the investigation and closer
determination of Kant's metaphysical ideas is in sharp contrast with the
little interest naturalists have taken in considering the new and ingenious
ideas which Kant has advanced in his three treatises on human race
concerning the history of nature. This gap [Girtanner's book] seeks to fill.
He endeavours to prove that the principle which was advanced by Kant
for the human races,1is a general law, which could be applied to the whole
of organized nature. s°
VI
With Girtanner's discussion we see coming to practical fruition a
development of concepts which began in a general way in the philosophy
of Leibniz and Wolff, were given a concrete application to natural history
by Buffon, were clarified and to some extent reinterpreted by Kant, and
were made by Girtanner the basis of an appeal for a new and generalized
research programme in natural history. Understood correctly, it meant
that a new way of looking at systematic natural history was to be under-
taken, one not antagonistic to the logical systematization of Linnaeus,
but in which traditional taxonomic and morphological concerns were
clearly separated from a temporal and genetic inquiry into the relations
of life. In several respects, in fact, Girtanner's programme represents a
return to Buffon. Girtanner's interpretation of Kant was to a large
extent, 'pre-critical', in the sense that there were none of the mature
Kantian strictures concerning the purely regulative character of inquiries
into historical and genetic relationships, and there is no compelling
evidence that Kant gave official approval to what Girtanner was doing
in his name.'S1
Yet if Girtanner's work was an appeal for a new inquiry into natural
history which pulled together many of the strands we have traced, the
direct impact of Girtanner on contemporary systematic work is not quite
what might have been expected. Blumenbach, for example, simply added
a footnote reference to Girtanner's work to the 1799 edition of his
Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, and did not abandon the basic taxonomic
principles he had worked out in the 1770s.'5* There was no change in
Blumenbach's concept of Naturgeschichte, for example, and the 'natural
system' was still grounded on the habitus, with no recognition of the
importance of the alternative approach along lines suggested by Kant
and Girtanner. The consequence of this is manifest in his reaffirmation,
in a long footnote obviously added in response to Girtanner's work, of
the principle of analogy:
If certain degenerations [Ausartungeri] have reproduced themselves for an

unlimited series of generations, it is often thought difficult to decide
whether these are merely races, or originally different species [Gattungeri].
At all events, there is in practice no other rule than that drawn [abstrahirt]
from analogy that we can apply in deciding such cases, since the [rule]
which has been accepted by Ray, Buffon, and others, in which the character
of the species [Species] is to be determined according to whether the creatures
generate fertile offspring with one another, is on this question very in-
adequate and uncertain. »53
Beyond a circle of devoted Kantians, it appears that in its original

form Girtanner's proposal for a complete reform of classification along
the lines of stem-relations had little immediate impact on contemporary
taxonomic work.I54 The charge made by Blumenbach that such an
approach was impractical, and that morphological approaches were to
be preferred—a position he justified by Newton's third rule—was the
typical response.^ But in more indirect ways, certain aspects of the
Kant-Girtanner programme received a very important, if somewhat
ambiguous endorsement in the writings of the zoologist Johann Karl
Illiger (1775-1813), who codified the terminology for subsequent German
natural history. Illiger was first trained as an entomologist under Johann
Hellwig at Braunschweig, and later gained fame and scientific influence
as an ornithologist, mammologist, and first director of the Museum of
Natural History at the University of Berlin. He has been singled out as
the individual who gave perhaps the clearest and most extended discussion
of the 'biological' species concept in the pre-Darwinian period.X56 In light
of the historical developments outlined above, I believe it is now possible
to determine the context of Illiger's discussion, and to link him with the
Buffon-Kant-Girtanner sequence we have followed.
In his treatment of the above theoretical issues in his Attempt at a
systematically complete terminology of 1800, a work written as a student at
Braunschweig, in different stages while recuperating from pulmonary
illness, Illiger's primary intention was to compose a theoretical dictionary
for the working taxonomist, denning the key terms and concepts en-
countered in natural history, morphology, anatomy, and taxonomy both
in zoology and in botany. In form, it is a work reminiscent of Linnaeus's
Critica botanica, generally aphoristic in style, and giving both definitions
and appended commentary in a series of numbered paragraphs. The
work also contained a preface added after what Illiger describes as 'later
and more extended reflections which have served to correct and clarify
many propositions which have been advanced in these sections'.J57 It
involved Illiger in the most explicit discussion to date of the definition of
taxonomic categories in biology, and their relation to the construction of a
natural classification.
Illiger's starting point for these reflections is most clearly revealed in
the body of the main text rather than in the preface itself. Although the
names of Kant, Girtanner, and Buffon are never cited, we are presented
with the stunning fact that his definitions of several key taxonomic
concepts, including 'Species', 'Race', 'Degeneration', 'Variety', 'Local
kind', and 'Nature-description', are verbatim transcriptions or close
paraphrases of the definitions given two years earlier by Girtanner.'S 8
Much of what appeared in the body of the text and preface did not,
therefore, come as particularly new. The preface, intended to give some
reflections on the concepts of species [Art] and genus [Gattung] as under-
stood in Naturgeschichte, reveals its prominent debt to Girtanner. A 'species'
in Naturgeschichte was denned as:
. . . the totality of all individuals which generate fertile young with one
another. This definition of the species, nature herself appears to dictate.
We can determine the species only through experiments on reproduction,
and it would be an error to accept, as has commonly tended to occur, that
species might be constituted by the extraction of general characters
common to several individuals. *5 9
Illiger again followed Buffon, Kant, and Girtanner in distinguishing

the 'natural-historical' concept of a species, defined by fertile inter-
breeding and grounded in nature itself, from the 'logical' species of
nature-description. Here his comments would seem to refer to Blumen-
bach's own discussion, which had received prominent restatement in the
year that Illiger wrote his preface. The practising 'nature-describer', he
argued, does not base his definition of species on interbreeding and
descent, but reasons '. . . only according to analogy', and concentrates on
the constancy of essential characters. And while Illiger did not, as we shall
shortly see, reject such operational criteria, he warned that this must not
be confused with the 'essentiality of the species', which, he argued,
'consists only in fertile reproduction'.
So far, it would seem that Illiger had only made more concrete some
of the directions taken by Kant and Girtanner, and had, like Girtanner,
implicity denied Blumenbach's approach by embracing Kant's
Naturgeschichte-Naturbeschreibung distinction. There was, however, more
to Illiger's analysis, that could only have resulted in ambiguity in the
way key taxonomic issues were understood by the succeeding tradition
that referred to Illiger's compendium. For although the preface was
explicitly intended to discuss the definition of categories in Naturgeschichte,
the work as a whole was oriented to a terminology for Naturbeschreibung,16"
and at several points the work shifted ambiguously from one domain to
the other. Mid-way through his discussion of the concepts of species and
genus in the preface, he made a confusing transition to the same concepts
as they were understood (by Girtanner, for example) as applying in
Naturbeschreibung. The motivation for this evidently lay in Illiger's desire
to remove the operational impracticality of the interbreeding criterion by
relating it to a morphological definition of species and higher categories.
Each 'natural' species presumably has some general characteristic
[Eigentumlich) which presents the imagination (Einbildungskrqft) with a
picture (Bild), revealing both its inner and outer relation of parts. 161
This concept is closely related to ideas of Blumenbach's,162 and it gave
Illiger a basis for moving from Maturgeschichte to Naturbeschreibung. But
if this shift was perhaps clear to Illiger, he developed it in a way which
could only have confused the distinctions carefully worked out by Kant
and Girtanner.
This is abundantly clear when Illiger turned from the discussion of
the species concept to that of the genus [Gattung] and other higher cate-
gories. These were not, as in Naturgeschichte, defined in terms of wider
networks of genealogical relationship, nor did Illiger even attempt to
relate his concept of genus to interbreeding and historical genesis. Genera
were rather defined on purely morphological grounds, using the concept
of the habitus discussed above. This he termed the 'sum of all characters
which we perceive united together in all individuals of the species', and
the category genus was defined as 'the mass or totality of species in which
the characters contained in the habitus commonly belong'. l63 This principle
was then applied to the construction of the taxonomic system as a whole:
'. . . just as we form the genera from species, we obtain the higher genera.
The orders and classes are formed from the genera . . .'.l64
The 'natural system' was thus defined by Illiger in terms very similar
to those of Blumenbach. It is a classification based '. . . on all the essential
characters [wesentliche Merkmale], and thus on the whole habitus'. This was
contrasted to the 'artificial' systems which are constructed on the basis of
the similarity and difference in a single part. l6 5
Thus, in spite of the clear link of Illiger to the tradition of Buffon,
Kant, and Girtanner which this study has disclosed,166 in the end it was
the morphological perspective of Naturbeschreibung on which the substance
of the work was based. And if the relationship between these two different
perspectives was recognized by Illiger, it was not carried through with a
terminological rigour which would allow the difference to be consistently
noted by the reader, despite the elucidations made in the preface. Con-
cepts explicitly confined by Kant and Girtanner to the history of nature,
such as Rasse and Art, were intermixed by Illiger with purely morpho-
logical definitions of most of the other taxonomic categories.l67
IUiger's acceptance of two conceptual orders and, as I would con-
clude, their incoherent blending in his influential text, is indicative of a
more profound taxonomic issue emerging in the early nineteenth century.
For a number of practical reasons, and in the light of the obvious success
of chemical science, the main taxonomic tradition continued to pursue
a solution to the problem of the 'natural system' in an approach analogous
to that of chemistry and mineralogy, emphasizing morphological 'affinity',
comparative anatomy, and the laws governing the 'horizontal' relation-
ships of organisms.168 But IUiger's work marked the first formal attempt
to bring aspects of a historical and genealogical approach to the whole
problem of the constitution and relation of taxonomic groups, even if this
approach was not satisfactorily developed. If this option was then aban-
doned by many naturalists for practical and even epistemological
reasons,l69 the conceptual foundations had nevertheless been laid for a
more radical genealogical reinterpretation of the classificatory system.
The implications of this for Darwin's work will be explored in subsequent
studies.
NOTES
1
C. Darwin, The origin of species, reprint of ist edn., Harmondsworth & Baltimore, 1968,
p. 427.
2
I am adopting the definition of 'historicism' as given by F. Meinecke, Historism (trans, by
J. E. Anderson), New York, 1972, pp. lv-lvi. This interprets the primary change in historical
consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century as involving the recognition of specifying
forces and principles acting in time, in opposition to universally acting general laws. While
Meinecke restricted this to human history, I would suggest that a similar transformation is
evident in late Enlightenment natural history. I would not like to be thought to be identifying
historicism simply with genetic explanation.
3 George Garden, 'A discourse concerning the modern theory of generation', Philosophical
transactions of the Royal Society, 1691, 17, 476-7 (published 1693).
4 This claim must, of course, be modified when talking of the later writings of Bonnet and
Haller. Bonnet's mature discussion of the problem in his Contemplation de la nature (1764—5), for
example, treated the pre-existence theory in terms of preformed germs, which develop in the
appropriate time and circumstance. This is very close to the position from which Kant initially
began in 1775 with his theory of the preexistent Keimen (see below, p. 129). This allowed at least
a limited degree of historical change and development, while still ensuring the essential unity of
the species.
5 In its more sophisticated versions, climate and food could effect the precise development of
the6'germs', if not their character.
Valuable general remarks on this crisis of historical knowledge can be found in P. H. Reill,
The German Enlightenment and the rise of historicism, Berkeley, 1975, chapter I. Reill makes no
attempt to discuss this issue in terms of the natural sciences, but the claims of the 'historical'
sciences were subject to the same epistemological difficulties.
7 I have explored this at length in the introduction to J. Lyon and P. R. Sloan, From natural
history to the history of nature: the initial response to Buffon's Histoire naturelle (MS in preparation).
An excellent discussion of certain of these issues is to be found in K. M. Baker, Condorcet: from
natural philosophy to social mathematics, Chicago, 1975, chapters II and III. For a valuable discussion
of the Newtonian criticism of 'world building' I have profited from D. C. Kubrin, 'Providence
and the mechanical philosophy', Cornell University PhD thesis, 1968, chapter XI.
8
Abbe Noel Pluche, The history of the heavens (tr. by J. B. de Freval), London, 1740, ii, 279.
In many places this work defended Newton against the Cartesians on the grounds of the epistemo-
logical modesty of Newtonian science, which Pluche saw as never claiming to reach beyond the
level of experience. See especially ii, 215.
10
9 Ibid., pp. 286-7.
Fontenelle, Histoire de Vacadimie rqyale des sciences (1733), in H. Potenz (ed.), Pages choisies des
grands
11
ecrivains: Fontenelle, Paris, 1909, p. 143.
In response to some perceptive criticisms made by Jonathan Hodge of the original version
of this paper, I wish to make clear my claim that the problem confronting historical science in
the early eighteenth century was primarily epistemological in character; I do not deny that
numerous attempts were made before Buffon to construct historical cosmologies and geologies.
In the wake of the crisis in historical knowledge created in part by Locke, Bayle, and Newton, the
problem was not the simple assertion of such claims, but their tenability. Buffon's great signifi-
cance, as I see it, lies in his willingness to confront the epistemological problem.
" The tendency to conflate Newton's and Locke's positions on space and time is to some
extent evident in the Leibniz-Clarke controversy, and the conflation was explicit in later thinkers
looking back at this. See, for example, M. Gabriel du Chatelet, Institutions de physique, Paris,
1740, p. 97.
'3 H. G. Alexander (ed.), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, New York, 1956, fourth letter, p. 39.
"4 Ibid., pp. 63, 75.
•56 Ibid.
• Ibid., fifth letter, p. 90.
•7 A. Koyre, From the closed world to the infinite universe, Baltimore, 1956, p. 275.
'• Leibniz's remarkable version of the preexistence theory denied not only the origin of the
organism in historical time, but also its death. See P. P. Weiner (ed.) Leibniz: selections, New
York, i95i,pp. n o , 195.
•9 Wolff's importance in fashioning the insights of Leibniz into a comprehensive programme of
metaphysical, theological, and scientific inquiry is in need of greater emphasis. This work
included the delimitation of numerous disciplines, including cosmology, hydrology, phytology,
psychology, physiology, and minerology, and the composition of treatises at the textbook level
in some of these subjects. Wolff's general programme is spelled out in his Preliminary discourse on
philosophy in general (tr. by R. B. Blackwell), Indianapolis, 1963.
"> Wolff, Philosophiaprima sive ontologia (1736), in Gesammelte Werke: Lateinische Schriften (ed. by
J . Ecole and H. W. Arndt), Hildesheim, 1962, iii, 443, 445.
ai
See J e a n Des Champs, Cours abrigi de la philosophie wolffienne en forme de lettres, Amsterdam &
Leipzig, 1743, i, 160. This work is a systematic precis of Wolff's philosophy, and was prepared
with his approval.
" Ibid., pp. 236-7.
*} Ibid., p. 242.
a
* See Lesley Hanks, Buffon avant I'histoire naturelle, Paris, 1966, p. 127. Buffon's deep admiration
for Newton is undeniable.
»J See I. O. Wade, Voltaire and Candide, Princeton, 1959, chapter III; idem., Voltaire and
Madame du Chdtelet, New York, 1967, chapter I; W. H. Barber, Leibniz in France, Oxford, 1955;
idem., 'Mme du Chatelet and Leibnizianism: the genesis of the Institutions de physique', in W. H.
Barber et al. (eds.), The age of Enlightenment: studies presented to Theodore Besterman, Edinburgh,
1967; Carolyn Merchant Iltis, 'Madame du Chatelet's metaphysics and mechanics', Studies in
the history and philosophy of science, 1977, 8, 29—48. I particularly wish to thank Professor Merchant
for allowing me to have access to this manuscript before publication, and for leading me to
additional references in this material.
16
French translations of Wolff's metaphysics and logic had been sent to Cirey by Frederick
the Great in 1736 (see Barber, 'Madame du Chatelet', op. cit. (25), p. 215; and Wade, Voltaire
and Candide, op. cit. (25), p. 35). The interest in Wolff's philosophy generated by these works
was apparently responsible for du Chatelet's bringing Wolff's disciple, Samuel Konig, to Cirey
to act as household tutor in March 1739, a post he held until December that year.
*7 See especially Barber, ibid. It is more correct to see du Chatelet's work as an exposition of
Wolffianism, rather than Leibnizianism. Des Champs, for example, pointing this out, indicated
that much of her discussion seems to be no more than a translation of Wolff's Ontologia
(Deschamps, op. cit. (21), i, 'Preface').
28
Reviews noted that this work had finally made clear and explicit the principles in the work
of Leibniz and Wolff that were of value. See Mercure de France, June 1741, pp. 1274-310.
*9 Most notably a foundation for natural necessity. Valuable historical remarks on this are to
be found in G. Tonelli, 'La n£cessit£ des lois de la nature au XVIII e siecle et chez Kant en 1762',
Revue d'histoire des sciences et leurs applications, 1959, 12, 225-41.
3° Gabrielle Emile du Chatelet, Institutions de physique, Paris, 1740, p. 119.
3' Ibid., p. 105.
3* Des Champs, op. cit. (21); Emer de Vattel, Defense du systeme leibnitien, Leiden, 1741.
33 La mdthode des fluxions et des suites infinies, Paris, 1740. I n t h e historical preface t o this work,
Buffon sided with Newton against Leibniz on the discovery of the calculus. This preface,
apparently written by 1738 (see Hanks, op. cit. (24), p. 108), elicited a defence of Leibniz from
his friend Gabriel Cramer, who was the editor both of some of Wolff's mathematical works,
and of the Leibniz-Johann Bernoulli correspondence. I have been unable to determine the
contents of Cramer's defence of Leibniz as sent to Buffon in 1741, but by 1744 Buffon wrote that
he now agreed with Cramer 'on many things'. See letter of 4 April 1744 in F. Weil (ed.), 'La
c o r r e s p o n d e n c e B u f f o n - C r a m e r ' , Revue d'histoire des sciences et leur applications, 1961, 14, 124.
34 Buffon was a close friend of Pierre de Maupertuis during the late 1730s and early 1740s
when Maupertuis was in the company of Wolffians like Samuel Konig. Buffon had also apparently
visited Cirey for an extended period in November 1738 (see letter of 4 November 1738 in:
Hanks, op. cit. (24), p. 259). By early 1740 Buffon mentioned that he was personally acquainted
with Konig, which suggests some kind of contact between them in 1739 when Konig was in
France. See the letter to Jean Jalabert, 11 January 1740, in E. Ritter (ed.), 'Lettres de Buffon et
de Maupertuis adressees a Jalabert', Revue d'histoire littiraire de la France, 1901, 8, 652.
35 J . P i v e t e a u ( e d . ) , Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, Paris, 1954, p . 2 6 .
3 6 Ibid., p . 11. I h a v e discussed this point in some detail in m y ' T h e Buffon-Linnaeus con-
troversy', Isis, 1976, 67, 3 5 6 - 7 5 .
37 At this point I should clarify what m a y a p p e a r to b e confused definitions of category a n d
taxon in m y analysis, as Professor Ernst M a y r suggested in comments on m y original paper.
I n terms of the distinctions initially made by J . R . Gregg, ' T a x o n o m y , language a n d reality',
American naturalist, 1950, 84, p p . 419-35, a n d b y R . Buck a n d D . L . Hull, ' T h e logic of t h e
L i n n e a n hierarchy', Systemic zoology, 1966, 15, 9 7 — i n , I a m concerned with different logical
types, identifying taxa as the classes of individual organisms (denoted b y the proper Latin names),
a n d categories as t h e classes of taxa (denoted by t h e names of the seven levels of the Linnaean
hierarchy). In these terms the interbreeding criterion is a proposal for a definition of a category
(e.g. species), which would demand that all taxa at the species level satisfy this condition for
class membership. Taxa at species level would comprise the fertilely-interbreeding (rather than
simply the morphologically-similar) group of individuals to which the taxon name may correctly
be applied. Apart from problems of anachronism, the difficulty in applying this analysis to
Buffon's discussion of species is that Buffon proposed that the biological species as a taxon be
conceived not as a class of individuals (however defined), but as a concrete, historical lineage,
linked in time by the materal bond of generation; he claimed that this could be the basis for a
taxonomic system of temporal connexions, rather than of relations of classes.
3 8 Buffon, 'Comparison des animaux & des vegetaux', Histoire naturelle, 1749, ii, in Piveteau,
op. cit. (35), p. 236.
39 Buffon, ' L ' a s n e ' , Histoire naturelle, 1753, iv, in ibid., p p . 3 5 5 - 6 .
4° This criterion was often cited in the eighteenth century, with reference to the works of
John Ray. See, for example, his Wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation, 5th edn.,
London, 1709, pp. 22, 342-3.
4" It should be noted that Buffon's theory of the movie intirieure conforms to the epistemological
premises I have suggested as primary in Buffon's mature thought, for he would seem to have
been claiming that Newtonian forces cannot be 'abstract', but must also have a 'concrete'
manifestation in nature. This is evident in his controversy in 1748 with Clairaut over the law of
attraction. Buffon there argued that particular, physical, causes should be sought to make
Newton's inverse-square law fit the observed situations, rather than introducing 'abstract'
mathematical terms which 'give no more than an arbitrary abstraction, instead of representing
reality to us' ('Reflection sur la loi de l'attraction', in G. Cuvier, ed., Oeuvres computes de Buffon,
Paris, 1835, i, 343). The theory of the moule intirieure did precisely this by giving specific, physical,
causes for each species, and thereby making immanent the principle of universal attraction.
4' Buffon, 'L'asne', in Piveteau, op. cit. (35), p. 386.
43 I have discussed this point previously in my 'The Buffon-Linnaeus controversy', loc. cit.
(36), q.v.
44 Buffon's preference for genealogical and biological relations over those of morphological
resemblance is a critical difference from virtually all of his important contemporaries, including
even his collaborator Daubenton (see below, p. 121). This point formed much of the substance
of the article on the ass, in that in terms of morphological similarity, the ass and horse would
appear to be more closely related than many of the varieties of dogs. Buffon was also explicit on
this point in the Histoire naturelle articles 'La chevre' (1755), and 'L'isatis' (1765).
45 See L i n n a e u s , Philosophia botanica, S t o c k h o l m , 1751, a p h o r i s m s 1 5 5 - 6 1 .
*6 Buffon, 'Histoire naturelle d e l ' h o m m e ' (1749), i n Piveteau, o p cit. (35), p . 3 1 3 .
47 Ibid., p. 195. Compare also with statements as early as 1749 in ibid., p. 313.
4 8 ' L e mouflon e t les a u t r e s brebis', Histoire naturelle, Paris, 1764, xi, 3 6 9 .
49 'Le lion' (1761), in Piveteau, op. cit. (35), p. 378.
5° Ibid., pp. 401, 408. The designation 'Famille' in the taxonomic literature had previously
been fairly consistently used as a French synonym of Linnaeus's Ordo. See, for example, J. T.
Klein, Systems naturel du rigne animal par classes, families ou ordres, genres et espices, Paris, 1754.
51 See quotation from 'Le mouflon', above, p. 119 at n. 48.
51 'De la nature, seconde vue' (1765), in Piveteau, op. cit. (35), pp. 35-6.
53 'De la degeneration des animaux', in ibid., p. 401.
54 'Oiseaux qui ne peuvent voler', in ibid., p. 417. Buffon went on to remark that this 'grand
view' was itself 'abstract', and needed to be made 'concrete' by showing the actual connexions
of the birds with the quadrupeds.
55 I have previously discussed this development in John Ray's taxonomic philosophy in my
'John Locke, John Ray, and the problem of the natural system', Journal of the history of biology,
•972, 5. i-53-
5 6 Linnaeus, op. cit. (45), aphorisms 162-3, 206. The use of the habitus had first been
popularized by Bauhin, and Linnaeus had given it a prominence from his earliest works.
Linnaeus's somewhat ambiguous conclusions on this have been well summarized by James L.
Larson, Reason and experience: the representation of natural order in the work of Carl von Linni, Berkeley,
1971, pp. 62-5. See also F. A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: the spreading of their ideas in
systematic botany, 1735—1783, Utrecht, 1971, pp. 66—73. This also includes a translation of some
of the critical passages from the works of Linnaeus on this matter. Daudin's classic study,
De Linni a Jussieu, Paris, 1926, shows that the French taxonomists, under Bernard de Jussieu's
lead, were intent on following the Linnaean approach to the natural system through the use of
the habitus, rather than using the sexual system based on a single part.
57 See, for e x a m p l e , M . A d a n s o n , Families des plantes, Paris, 1763, i, p p . civ—vi, clix, clxx.
Adanson had also affirmed this principle in his earlier writings, probably deriving it from
Bernard de Jussieu or Linnaeus. Other influential examples of the attempt to use the habitus or
'port' as a foundation for the 'natural system' can be seen in A. L. Jussieu's highly influential
'Examen de la famille de des renoncles', Mimoires de I'Academic rqyale des sciences, 1773, especially
pp. 237—g. In this, Jussieu also insisted on the importance of the differential weighting of
characters. Condorcet, in his summary of Jussieu's paper, considered it revolutionary, and
responsible for inserting a new principle into taxonomy: Histoire de VAcadimie royale des sciences,
1777, pp. 34-6. This drew an indignant response from Adanson, who claimed he had clearly
delimited this principle as early as 1759, and felt that Jussieu had taken it from him without
acknowledgment. See M. Adanson, 'Eclairissement sur la m^thode naturelle de m. de Jussieu,
compare a mes families des plantes en 1774', Adanson MS. A D 315, Hunt Botanical Library,
Pittsburgh (probably written in 1780).
5 8 Adanson, Families des plantes, op. cit. (57), p. cccxxiv.
59 P. L. Farber, 'Buffon and Daubenton: divergent traditions within the Histoire naturelle',
Isis, 1975, 66, 63—74. Farber has noted well the contrast between Daubenton's ahistorical and
comparative-morphological point of view, and Buffon's dynamic and historical approach to
natural history. Some explanation for this difference in perspective between two apparent
collaborators can perhaps be given by considering Buffon's solitary work habits. The picture
revealed by Buffon's correspondence, as well as by the interview with Herault de Seychelles late
in Buffon's life, suggests that Buffon was doing his scientific work almost exclusively at Montbard,
while in Paris he carried on only administrative work. The extant correspondence between
Buffon and Daubenton, dating mainly from the 1760s, indicates almost no direct contact
between them, and suggests that they were simply sending articles for the Histoire naturelle
independently to the publisher, and without consultation on the contents. See G. Michaut,
'Buffon administrateur et homme d'affaires: lettres in^dits', Annales de I'universiti de Paris,
January-February 1931, pp. 15—36. On this divergence, see also Isidore Geoffroy St Hilaire,
Histoire naturelle glnirale des regnes organiques, Paris, 1859, ii, 3 9 8 - 9 .
60
D a u b e n t o n , ' B o t a n i q u e ' , Encyclopldie, ou dictionnaire raisonni des sciences, des arts et des mitiers,
Paris, 1751, ii, 341.
61
I am following the summaries of all these systems in Adanson, Families des plantes, op. cit.
(57). i, 'Preface'.
6i
These systems, unlike the Linnaean artificial system, or those of Tournefort and Rivinus, all
used characters other than reproductive parts.
6
3 For remarks on the complex influence of Linnaeus in Germany, see especially Stafleu,
op. cit. (56), chapter VIII. Stafleu's analysis needs to be revised somewhat, however, in light
of the fact that many also saw Linnaeus, as advocating a 'natural system' based on the habitus.
See below, p. 123.
6
< This is despite what might have been expected in view of the strong Wolffian tradition in
Germany. Only Kant, of the figures I discuss, seems to have been sufficiently in contact with the
intricacies of Wolffian metaphysics, and epistemology to have perceived the critical point.
6
5 See, for e x a m p l e , t h e reviews i n the Gottingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 1750, p p . 51—4,
59—62, 283—7; 1754, p p . 188—91. I t is p a r t i c u l a r l y surprising t h a t t h e last review i g n o r e d all
significant comment on the theses of the unity of type, the unity of historical origin, and the
problem of species, which are so prominent in several of the articles in the volume reviewed.
66
The first volume was translated by Zink, and the second two by Abraham Kastner, accord-
ing to the short notice in ibid., 1751, p. 3. I have been unable to determine the subsequent
translators of this original German edition. Kastner also seems to have been responsible for the
notes to all of the first three volumes. The subsequent translation by F. H. W. Martini et al.,
Berlin, 1771—1808, was, like most foreign editions, inexpensive. It was based primarily, it seems,
on the 1769 Paris edition, with the original order of exposition altered. I wish to acknowledge
the assistance of Professor Shirley Roe in determining more about the translation of the original
edition.
6
7 Albrect von Haller, 'Vorrede', to Buffon, Allgemeine Historie der Natur, Hamburg & Leipzig,
1750, i, p. xv.
68
A. Kastner, in note to 'Erzahlung der methodischen Eintheilungen der vierfiissigen Thiere',
in ibid., 1754, ii, p. 78n.
6
9 Kastner, note to 'Von der Art die Historie der Natur zu erlernen und abzuhandeln', ibid.,
1
75°. i. P- 38n.
7° Ibid., pp. 36n—37n.
71 See r e v i e w i n Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, 1 7 7 1 , 15, 5 8 9 - 5 2 .
72 Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 1st edn., Leyden, 1735. The classification of the Anthropomorpha
given in this edition remained essentially unaltered through to the ninth edition of 1756.
73 Buffon made this point with particular force in the article on the ass in 1753. See the strong
endorsement of Buffon's conclusions in Diderot's article 'Humain espece', Encyclopldie, ou
dictionnaire raisonni . . ., Neuchatel, 1765, viii, 344—8.
74 This included a split of genus Homo into H. nocturnus (night men) and H. diumus (including
the H. sapiens of the 10th edn.), in the twelfth edition of the Systema of 1766. The thirteenth
edition split Homo into two species, sapiens and monstrosus, with sapiens including a mute, four-
footed, and hairy 'wild man' on the same level as the other traditional varieties. On Linnaeus'
complex struggle with the classification of man, see G. Broberg, Homo sapiens L., Uppsala, 1975
(English summary).
'5 In Piveteau (ed.), op. cit. (35), p. 390.
7' Henry Home, Six sketches on the history of man . . . with an appendix concerning the propagation of
animals, Philadelphia, 1776 (first published, 1774), sketch I.
77 A close familiarity with the 'Preuves de la th£orie de la terre', of the first volume of the
Histoire naturelle, is evident through much of Kant's discussion, and he used Buffon's calculations
to support his own cosmological theory. See Immanuel Kant, Friihschriften (ed. by G. Klaus),
Berlin, 1961, i, 99. Kant does not seem to have owned a copy of Buffon, but then his entire
library apparently consisted of only around 200 books, and for financial reasons he could
probably not have purchased the sumptuous Leipzig edition of Buffon. On Kant's library, see
A. Warda, Immanuel Kants Biicher, Berlin, 1922.
7s Johan Lulof, Einleitung zu der mathematischen und physikalischchen Kenntniss der Erdkugel (tr. by
A . K a s t n e r ) , G o t t i n g e n & Leipzig, 1755; B e r n a r d V a r e n i u s , Geographia generalis, C a m b r i d g e ,
1681. See K a n t ' s 1757 p r o s p e c t u s for t h e course i n Friihschriften, o p . c i t . (77), i, 2 8 4 .
79 Ibid., p. 290.
80
On the complex history of this text, see the summary remarks in J. A. May, Kant's conception
of geography, Toronto, 1970, pp. 74—5. May is drawing on Adickes' extensive collation of the
manuscripts. Of central importance is Adickes' conclusion that the first fifty-two sections of this
work date from Kant's post-1770 period, while the second half date from the 1760s.
81
Buffon had, however, begun in 1770 to treat the birds by main genera in the Histoire
naturelle des oiseaux.
8:
Johann Unold, Die ethnologischen und anthropographischen Anschauung bei I. Kant und J. Reinh.
Forster, Leipzig, 1886, p. 19. However, I have been unable to locate direct evidence proving
Kant's knowledge of this work of Kames.
8
3 J. F. Blumenbach, 'On the natural varieties of mankind' (1st edn., 1776), in T. Bendysche
(ed. and tr.), The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, London, 1865, p . 98.
S
4 Kant had formally separated anthropology from geography by 1773, and had also separated
out a metaphysics of nature from the metaphysics of sense. See letter to Marcus Herz written
towards the end of 1773, in Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel (ed. by O. Schondorffer), Hamburg,
1972, p. 115.
Si
This distinction was, I would suggest, implicit in Buffon's separation of the 'abstract' and
'physical' approaches to natural history, although it was never made with the clarity Kant
developed. Kant's use of the term Naturgeschichte, in the technical sense of a genetic history of
nature, was first suggested in his early Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels of 1755,
which gave a genetic account of the origin of the solar system. The more explicit distinction of
Naturgeschichte from Naturbeschreibung seems to have been contemporaneous with Kant's separation
of space and time, as particularly manifest in the separation of geography from history in the
opening lecture to the Physische Geographie, which apparently dates from around 1775. See May,
op. cit. (80), p. 72.
86
This is evident in his earliest work, where he argued that extension and space (and pre-
sumably time) have no existence unless there is a connection of substances with one another
through living forces; Kant, 'Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces', in: Kant's inaugural
dissertation and early writings on space (tr. by John Handyside), Chicago, 1929, p. 10. See also
Sadik J. Al-Azm, Kant's theory of lime, New York, 1967, pp. 11—14.
£
/ This is most evident in his 'Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im
Raume', in Friihschriften, op. cit. (77), ii, 356, where he argued that absolute and primordial
space is not an object of sensation, but a ground-concept making possible the relationships of
corporeal objects. The complex connexion of this concept to the relation and succession of
objects constituting Leibnizian time and space is the subject of a complicated discussion in the
Critique ofpure reason, especially at A 177 ff. By relating time and space as a priori forms of intuition
to the empirical coexistence and succession of objects, Kant would seem to have justified carrying
on empirical enquiries into the natural world in both a historical and a descriptive way, while
still remaining consistent with the 'critical' reform. Such a synthesis would, in my view, have
made possible a continuation by Kant of the 'historical' approach to the issue of taxonomic
relationships, despite his break with Leibniz on the space-time question, which I have seen as a
fundamental component of Buffon's thought.
88
K a n t , Physische Geographie ( e d . b y F . T . R i n k , 1802), in I m m a n u e l K a n t , Sdmtliche Werke
(ed. by P . G e d a n ) , Leipzig, 1905, ix, 5—18. A full translation of this introduction is to b e found
in M a y , o p . cit. (80).
8
9 Ibid, p. 11.
?° Ibid.
5' See Critique of pure reason, A 34.
'» Kant, op. cit. (88), p. 14.
93 Kant's technical uses of Rasse, Stamm and Abartung would all appear to have been derived
from Buffon, as the German translations of the French race, souche and dlginiration and his
examples closely resemble those appearing in Buffon's article, 'd6g£n£ration des animaux' of
1766, which had appeared in German in the Leipzig edition of Buffon in 1772. Kant was later
accused of importing into taxonomy concepts derived from the French. See below, note 116.
9* Kant, op. cit. (88), p. 14: 'Wahre Philosophic aber ist es, die Verschiedenheit und
Mannigfaltigkeit einer Sache durch all Zeiten zu verfolgen'.
9! Kant, 'Von der verschiedenen Racen der Menschen', in: Kants Werke, Berlin, 1912, ii, 429.
The ambiguity in the German Gattung complicates the exact translation of these passages. Unlike
the mainstream of German zoologists, Kant seems generally to have used Gattung as the transla-
tion of the Latin genus, or French genre. A consistent practice was established in the Leipzig
translation of Buffon, which was followed out systematically by Blumenbach, for example, in
rendering genre as Geschlecht, and espke as Gattung. Kant argued in 1785, however, that in the
sense in which the terms were used in Naturgeschkhte, there was no distinction to be made between
Art and Gattung. See quotation below, p. 131.
9 6 See quotation above, p . 117.
97 K a n t , loc. cit. (95).
9 8 I t is the epistemologkal primacy of a 'physical' and 'historical' meaning of taxonomic groups
that I consider to be the critical connexion between Buffon and Kant, and a point which was
missed by all other contemporaries of Buffon I have yet encountered. The critical difference which
might possibly separate Buffon and Kant would seem to be related to Kant's rejection of the
primacy of Leibnizian space and time. Whereas Buffon had emphasized the 'physical' reality of
the species as constituted by the temporal succession of beings, Kant rather emphasized the
grounding of the species in an underlying law, manifest in reproductive fertility. This is indeed
related to Buffon's concept of the moule interieure but, if my analysis is correct, Buffon had
subordinated this fertility criterion to historical succession.
99 K a n t , op. cit. (95), p . 440.
100 Ibid., p. 430.
101
Ibid., p. 440.
101
Kant was conversant with Buffon's theory of the moule intfrieure, but considered it untenable
(see Friihschriften, op. cit. (77), ii, 7g-8o). There are many similarities between Kant's theory of
generation and Charles Bonnet's germ theory, as developed in his Considerations sur Us corps
organists, 1762, section XXVIII.
"°3 See the review in Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, 1777, 35, 330-6. No mention is made of
Kant's distinction between Naturgeschkhte and Naturbeschreibung, nor is the significance of Kant's
'physical' interpretation of the concept of race noted.
1
°4 Blumenbach gave only a passing reference to Kant's 1777 paper in 1781, in the second
edition of his De generis humani varietate, and then only to note that Kant had recognized four
'varieties' of men, which he contrasted with the varieties recognized by Linnaeus, Goldsmith,
Erxleben, and Hunter. It seems that Blumenbach only attended to Kant's arguments more
closely after the Kant-Foster controversy in 1786.
•°5 This is not to deny that there may have been other areas of agreement between Kant and
Blumenbach, but only to note the lack of any evident impact of Kant's arguments on
Blumenbach's actual practice in taxonomy.
106
D a u d i n ' s suggestion t h a t B l u m e n b a c h ' s t a x o n o m y showed some close similarities t o t h e
influential p r i n c i p l e s of A n t o i n e L a u r e n t de Jussieu w h i c h w e r e p u b l i s h e d in 1773 a n d 1774
would b e c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y consistent. See D a u d i n , o p . cit. (56), p . 2 1 9 .
10
7 B l u m e n b a c h , Handbuch der Naturgeschkhte, G o t t i n g e n , 1779, ' V o r r e d e ' , p p . [ i i i - i v ] . T h i s
p r i m a r i l y ' m o r p h o l o g i c a l ' c o n c e p t of Naturgeschkhte w a s also n o t e d b y B l u m e n b a c h ' s chief
biographer and student, Marx: 'Natural History, not the description of nature, was the aim he
placed before him. With Bacon he considered that as the first subject of philosophy . . . , and
showed also how the inner properties, relations, and attributes of the individual were connected
with each other and their connection and position to the whole. With this view he busied himself
actively on organic and also on animal nature': The anthropological treatises of J. F. Blumenbach,
op. cit. (83), p. 10. Thus, while Blumenbach's concept of Naturgeschkhte was not purely descriptive,
it was not really equivalent to Kant's concept. In this my conclusions would disagree somewhat
with those of Timothy Lenoir in his forthcoming 'Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's research
programme for natural history and the biological thought of the Naturphilosophen' (unpublished
MS; personal communication).
108
B l u m e n b a c h , Handbuch, ibid., p p . 5 6 - 5 7 . T h i s passage w a s o n l y slightly a l t e r e d in s u b s e q u e n t
editions of t h e Handbuch.
•°9Of particular note here is the examination of Kant's ideas of 1778 by the pioneer zoo-
geographer, Eberhard Zimmermann (1743-1810), of the Collegium Carolinum at Braunschweig.
Zimmermann was closely acquainted with Buffon's theory of degenerative change but, in a
unique reading of the consequences of this theory, argued that inasmuch as the interbreeding
criterion no longer seemed to hold, it was reasonable to conclude that from a common Slammvater
the process of degeneration could proceed in time to the point that the different lineages had to
be recognized as forming distinct species [Arteri]. See his Geographische Geschichte des Menschen und
der allgemeine verbreiteten vierfiissigen Thiere, Leipzig, 1778, i, 'Vorrede'. Zimmerman's arguments in
particular seem to have forced Kant to re-examine the topic. See Kant's letter to Jacob Engel,
4 July 1779 in Kant, Briefwechsel, op. cit. (84), p. 188.
110
111
See Kant's letter to Johann Breitkopf, 1 April 1778, in ibid., p. 170.
Kant, 'Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse', in: Imtnanuel Kants Werke (ed. by
E. Cassirer), Berlin, 1922, xxiv. This originally appeared in the Berlinische Monatschrift, 1785, 6.
*" Ibid., p. 324.
"3 For biographical details see especially the article by A. Dove in Allgemeine deutsche Biographic,
Leipzig, 1878, vii, 173-81. Forster was a friend of Blumenbach's and co-editor with Lichtenberg
of the Gottingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur from 1780 to 1785, and then, during
his stay in Kassel, he edited the Hessische Beitrage zur Gelehrsamkeit und Kunst. Forster was also the
translator of the sixth volume of the Berlin edition of Buffon's Histoire naturelle.
"4 Deitrich Tiedemann, a co-editor with Forster of the Hessische Beitrage, gave a detailed
discussion of some of the groundwork of Kant's philosophy in Hessische Beitrage, 1785, /, 113-30;
233-48; 464-74. Kant found this highly incompetent. See his letter to Johann Bering, 7 April
1786, in Kant, Briefwechsel, op. cit. (84), p. 291.
"5 An example of Forster's concrete taxonomic practice in 1785 can be discerned in his
'Beschreibung des Brodbaums', Hessische Beitrage, 1785, /, 384-400. In this he most closely
followed Linnaeus's sexual system.
"'Forster, 'Noch etwas iiber Menschenrassen', Teutsche Merkur, 1786, 56", 73, 79.
"7
11
Ibid., pp. 79-80.
' Kant, 'Ueber den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophic', in: Kants Werke,
op. cit. (111), iv, 491. This first appeared in the Teutsche Merkur, 1788, 61, 36-52; 123-36.
"9 Ibid., p. 491.
120
Ibid., pp. 489-90. I am also interpolating here some of the general discussion found in the
Critique of pure reason, especially A 644-68.
•" Kant, op. cit. (118), p. 493.
122
Kant, Critique of pure reason, A 660, modified from Norman Kemp Smith's translation,
London, 1963, p. 543. Kant's general argument on this point in the Critique was that while the
unification of organisms into natural species by interbreeding relations gave their unification
under the categories of the understanding, their historical unification by derivation from distant
common ancestors could only be a unifying and regulative idea of pure reason. As such, it could
have a regulative, but never a constitutive function.
"3 Kant, op. cit. (118), p. 493.
"4 Ibid., pp. 494-5.
•'5 Many of the complex relations of Kant and other members of the German scientific com-
munity have been perceptively discussed by Timothy Lenoir in his 'Generational factors in the
origin of Romantische Naturphilosophie', Journal of the history of biology, 1978, / / , 57—100. He is
currently working on a more detailed discussion of the relationship of Kant and Blumenbach.
116
J. F. Blumenbach, 'Uber Menschen-Rassen und Schweine-Rassen', Voigts Magasinfiir das
Neueste mis der Physik und Naturgeschichte, 1789, 6, 6-7.
"'Thus in his Beytrage zur Naturgeschichte, Gottingen, 1790, pp. 38-9, Blumenbach was to
argue that the degree of morphological difference between some varieties of dogs was so great
that he was willing to presume different stem-species for them, even though they could all
interbreed fertilely. For either Buffon or Kant, this would have been a serious confusion.
128
See Blumenbach's discussion of the species concept first inserted into the third edition of his
Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, Gottingen, 1788, 'Vorrede', p. vii, where he stated that at least in
the ordinary case, animals of the same species (Gattung) could interbreed with one another.
Blumenbach's increasingly morphological definition of taxonomic groups was, however, evident
in the revisions of this ever-changing preface in subsequent editions. In the fifth edition of 1797,
Blumenbach inserted the claim that the fundamental definition to be given of the category
genus (Geschlecht) is 'the similarity of different species [Gattungen] of things'.
"'Banks, as well as Georg Forster, had accompanied Cook on his second voyage around the
world.
'3° Blumenbach to Banks, in Anthropological treatises, op. cit. (83), pp. 151—2.
'31 Ibid., p. 153. This classification was slightly revised in the fifth and subsequent editions of
the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, with the Glires and Ferae placed under the Class Palmata.
'32 Ibid., pp. 188-9.
'33 Blumenbach and Kant exchanged books in the :790s, and Kant made use of the
Bildungstrieb theory for aspects of his Kritik der Urteilskraft of 1790. See notes 105 and 125 above.
'34 By the French, for example, Blumenbach was often seen as no more than a slavish follower
of Linnaean systematics. As Pierre Flourens wrote: '. . . everything belonging to method was
neglected by Blumenbach; he confined himself to following Linnaeus; he adopted from him
almost all his divisions, with whatever advantage they had, and also with all their defects, their
narrowness of study, and their caprice'. Flourens, 'Life of Blumenbach', in: Blumenbach,
Anthropological treatises, op. cit. (83), p. 53.
'35 Girtanner had studied medicine under Blumenbach at Gottingen from 1780 to 1782, and then
on two separate journeys abroad (1784—87; 1788-90) had studied medicine and chemistry at
Edinburgh. The best accessible biography of Girtanner is by Carl Wegelin, 'Dr. med. Christoph
Girtanner (1760-1800)', Gesnerus, 1957, 14, 141-63.
•3' Kant's own knowledge of Girtanner's work seems to have been rather indirect; only on one
occasion did he mention Girtanner's application of his philosophy in a brief, laudatory mention
in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), in: Kants gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, 1917, vii,
320. Apparently Kant owned only Girtanner's book on antiphlogistic chemistry. See A. Warda,
Kants Biicher, op. cit. (77).
'37 Kant commended Reinhold's timely exposition of some of his philosophical principles in this
respect, and it was apparently to Reinhold, as one of the editors of the Teutsche Merkur, that he
sent his response to Forster in late 1787. See letters of 28 and 31 December 1787, and reply of
19 January 1788 in Kant, Briefivechsel, op. cit. (84), pp. 334, 337. Under Reinhold's direction,
Jena was a centre of intensive study of Kantianism. See Reinhold's letter to Kant of 21 January
1793, in ibid., p. 624. In his subsequent collection and amplification of these letters, Reinhold
made much more explicit the programmatic character of Kantianism. See K. Reinhold, Briefe
iiber die kantische Philosophic, Jena, 1790. He also expounded on Kant's philosophy in his 'Ueber
das bisherige Schicksale der kantischen Philosophie', Jena, 1789, which also appeared in an abbreviated
form in the Teutsche Merkur for 1789.
•3' See the letter to Kant of 9 October 1789 from Johann Jachmann (in Edinburgh) in: Kants
gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, 1900, xi, 92.
'39jachmann seems to have been particularly close to Kant in this period, and was recom-
mended by him in 1788 for the foreign medical scholarship at Edinburgh: ibid., x, 511. Jachmann
is also reported to have given lectures on Kant's philosophy at Edinburgh during his stay. See
the article on Reinhold B. Jachmann, Johann's older brother and Kant's first biographer, in
Neue deutsche Biographie, 1974, x, 214.
M° Letters from Jachmann to Kant, 9 October 1789 and 14 October 1790, in loc. cit. (138),
xi, 92, 204.
'4' Christoph Girtanner, Ueber das kantische Prinzip fur die Naturgeschichte, Gottingen, 1796,
'Vorrede', p. ii.
'4* Ibid., pp. 3-4. Girtanner's use of Gattung, unlike Kant's, consistently meant species, thus
following Blumenbach's conventions (see above, note 95). In the light of Kant's claim that the
distinction of Art and Gattung in Naturgeschichte was unimportant, this terminological ambiguity
would not seem critical.
•43 Ibid., p. 3.
'44 Ibid., p. 4.
•45 Ibid., p. 54.
•4' Ibid., pp. 282-3. Drawing to a large degree on the studies of Pierre Simon Pallas on the
fauna and flora of Siberia, Buffon had placed the origin of man in east Asia, between 40 and 55
degrees of latitude, from which there was migration and racialization as the earth gradually
cooled. See Epoques de la nature, in Piveteau (ed.), Oeuvres philosophiques, op. cit. (35), pp. 188 ff.
Zimmerman, however, was less inclined to allow such unitary centres of origin. See Forster,
'Etwas ueber . . .', p. 157. Girtanner displays close familiarity with the work of both Buffon and
Zimmermann.
•47 See Kant's own synthesis of these ideas in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, para. 81. Girtanner cited
this work often.
'4' Girtanner, op. cit. (141), p. 345. A detailed exploration of Girtanner's use of Blumenbach's
Bildungstrieb theory is to be found in Lenoir, op. cit. (107).
•49 Girtanner termed the work only a n ' . . . erste Versuch einer philosophischen Naturgeschichte'.
See ibid., p. 416.
'5° Unsigned review Gottingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 24 October 1796, 171, 1705-12.
•s1 In 1793 Girtanner solicited, via Johann Erhard, Kant's opinion of his treatise on anti-
phlogistic chemistry. See Erhard to Kant, 17 January 1793, in Kant, Briefivechsel, op. cit. (84),
p. 622. Kant apparently made no reply. See also above, note 136.
'5» Blumenbach, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, 6th edn., Gottingen, 1799, p. 24n. The reference
was simply added without comment to a note previously referring to Kant's 1788 paper.
'53 Ibid.,
•54 The Leipzig philologist and anthropologist, Johann Gruber, complained in his German
translation of the third edition of Blumenbach's De varietate, that naturalists (presumably in-
cluding Blumenbach), refused to accept Kant's new divisions of organisms in terms of stem-
relations. See Blumenbach, Uber die natilrlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte (tr. by
J . G. Gruber), Leipzig, 1798, 'Appendix', pp. 259-61.
•55 See Blumenbach, Anthropological treatises, op. cit. (83), pp. 190-1.
•56 E. Mayr, 'Illiger and the biological species concept', Journal of the history of biology, 1968, / ,
163—78. This is primarily a translation, with an introductory commentary, of Illiger's preface,
'Einige Gedanken iiber die Begriffe: Art und Gattung in der Naturgeschichte', to his Versuch
einer systematischen vollstandigen Terminologie fur das Thierreich und Pflanzenreich, Helmstadt, 1800,
pp. xxv-xlvi. For biographical details, see Mayr, ibid., and E. Stresemann, Ornithology from
Aristotle to the present (tr. by H. J. & C. Epstein), Cambridge, Mass., 1975, chapter VI.
"57 Illiger, ibid., p. xxv.
"58 Illiger's text (ibid.) opens almost identically to Girtanner's (op. cit. (141)). For example,
Girtanner: 'Die Natur is der Inbegriff von allem, was nach bestimmten Gesetzen existirt' (p. 1);
Illiger: 'Natur, Natura ist der Inbegriff von allem, was nach bestimmten Gesetzen existirt' (p. 2).
Another important example: Girtanner: 'Die Naturbeschreibung (Physiographie) ist die Kenntniss
der naturlichen Dinge, wie sie jetzt sind' (p. 1); Illiger: 'Naturbeschreibung, Physiographia, die
Kenntnis der naturlichen Korper unsers Erdbodens, wie sie jetzt sind' (p. 2). Other examples
could readily be given. These definitions are themselves reworkings by Girtanner of the opening
discussion of Kant's 1788 paper. Illiger's discussion of the division of species into subordinate
groups is taken almost verbatim from Girtanner (compare Illiger, op. cit., pp. 6—7 with
Girtanner, op. cit., p. 8).
•59 Illiger: '[Art, Species] ist der Inbegriff aller Individuen, welche fruchtbare Junge miteinander
zeugen' (op. cit. (156), p. xxvi); Girtanner: 'Alle Thiere, oder Pflanzen, die mit einander
fruchtbare Junge zeugen, gehoren zu Einer physischen Gattung' (op. cit. (141), p. 4). The
fundamental difference lies in Illiger's use of Art rather than Gattung in his discussion, and the
absence of the adjective physical.
160
'In eine Terminologie der Naturbeschreibung gehort nicht die Naturgeschichte der
Klassen . . .', Ibid., p. xxii.
161
Ibid., pp. xxiii—xxv.
161
See Lenoir, op. cit. (107).
l6
3 Illiger, op. cit. (156), pp. xxxiii, xxv. See also text, p. 108.
"'4 Ibid., p. xlvi.
•<>5 Ibid., pp. 107-8.
166
This linkage was also recognized b y later commentators. See especially Isidore Geoffroy
St Hilaire, o p . cit. (59), ii, 3 9 9 . 1 wish to t h a n k Professor Camille Limoges for directing m e to this
very valuable discussion in his comments on t h e original draft of this paper.
16
7 Illiger was accused b y early reviewers of his work of confusing in important respects some
issues a n d terminology. His use of Art a n d Gattung for genus a n d species, for example, was viewed
as a d e p a r t u r e from t h e standard practice, instituted especially b y Blumenbach. H e w a s also
accused of neglecting t h e d o m a i n of Naturgeschichte i n t h e text of the work. See the unsigned
review i n Allgemeine Literature-Zeitung, 8 M a y 1800, 131, 3 0 6 - 7 .
168
T h e pervasive conclusion t h a t the key t o a ' n a t u r a l ' system was to b e found in some kind
of affinity of organisms, analogous to chemical affinity, was p r e d o m i n a n t in b o t h F r e n c h a n d
German taxonomy in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See, for example,
A. L. Jussieu, op. cit. (57); Felix Vicq d'Azyr, 'Systeme anatomique: quadrupedes', in Encyclo-
pldie mithodique, Paris, 1792, ii, p. iii;Johann Hermann, Tabula affinitatum animalium, Argentorati,
1783; I would also see similar organizing concepts at work in the taxonomy of Blumenbach and
Cuvier.
16
9 Forty years later, the botanist and theoretician of natural history Anton F. Spring noted
that the distinctions and genealogical concepts of Kant and Girtanner had found their way in
to several handbooks, but remained '. . . dennoch fur das System selbst ohne Anwendung'.
A. F. Spring, Ueber die naturhistorischen Begriffe von Gattung, Art und Abart, und iiber die Ursachen der
Abartungen in den organischen Reichen, Leipsig, 1838, p . 76.

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BUFFON, GERMAN BIOLOGY, AND

THE HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

* General Program of Liberal Studies/Program in History and Philosophy of Science,

than in terms of their atemporal relations. This concept, forming at least

Thus the material universe, in spite offillingonly an exceedingly small part

ment of the pre-existence theory in embryology, which went so far as to

Time is thus the order of successive beings [litres] in a continuous series.

If I am correct in asserting that Buffon's approach to natural history

This power of producing its like, the chain of successive existences of

The critical innovation in BufFon's species concept is not so much

In Buffon's view, a more permanent variety in this sense became a

Just as it appeared necessary to us, in composing the history of the wild

Likewise, a 'family' of organisms was no longer to be equated with the

As Buffon developed his reflections on the meaning of the taxonomic

An individual, of whatever species it might be, is nothing in the universe .. .

Yet there also were complex networks of subordinate historical

guishable grades of genealogical and material relationship. As he wrote

. . . The groundless and offensive judgments concerning taxonomic systems

Concerning Buffon's more general argument concerning the two

Enlightenment anthropology. The central issue in anthropological theory

showed a profound reorientation in his approach to the race issue,

The division of the objects of knowledge [Erkenntnisse] according to concepts

Then, employing precisely the terminology that was codified in German

Kant's point here—distinguishing with Buffon between a 'physical'

The exact language of this last passage bears close attention. As

A genus of animals [Thiergattung], which has a common stem, does not

The human variants were thus defined as 'races' in this classification:

The consequences of this conception of Naturgeschichte are manifest

We have thus endeavoured to remedy this deficiency and to sketch out a

Of course the force of Kant's precise distinctions could not really

From the standpoint of natural history, taxonomic species must often

In the history of nature, which is concerned only with generation and

could be resolved by purely philosophical and epistemological considera-

The perspective of Naturgeschichte, it would seem, resolved the tension

be decided by fertile interbreeding, which for Kant had formed the

No naturalist, to my knowledge, has yet carried his scepticism so far as to

Blumenbach's failure, or unwillingness, to admit Kant's basic point

As an example of his reforms, Blumenbach then proposed in the letter a

extend Kant's ideas explicitly in the direction of natural history was a

Girtanner's monograph began with a synthetic and systematic exposition

The synthesis of the ideas of Kant and those of Blumenbach is evident

But where Blumenbach had moved increasingly away from a conception

Girtanner then discussed the concrete bearing of this for biological

While he admitted that such a project would require perhaps another

If certain degenerations [Ausartungeri] have reproduced themselves for an

Beyond a circle of devoted Kantians, it appears that in its original

Illiger again followed Buffon, Kant, and Girtanner in distinguishing

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