Word: buffons
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Picasso seemed like the last man in the world for the job. In 1937, art dealer Ambroise Vollard was looking for someone to illustrate Buffon's classic, 18th Century Histoire Naturelle. Picasso, who once remarked that "through art we express our conception of what nature is not," had just finished his grotesque, horribly unrealistic Guernica (TIME...
When Madame de Pompadour's pet Comte de Buffon began the first encyclopedic natural history, he simplified his task by casually describing each species in terms of one specimen. Two centuries later, Picasso has embellished the Count's manuscript in the same spirit: by etching each creature with easy, sometimes careless familiarity, as if it were an ancient inhabitant of his own private park...
...mile Hollywood caricatures, manage, with the aid of some smooth dialogue to over shadow the big three on numerous occasions, Claude Raines, as the boot-licking, opportunistic Vichy chief of police is at his best. Conrad Veidt plays a Gestapo chief who, unlike the usual blustering buffon that Hollywood Nazis usually are, is more sinister than laughable. Peter Lorre, an unseen corpse after the first few scenes, and Dooley Wilson, playing "As Time Goes By" to repair broken hearts, complete the list of ingredients in this North African melting...
...Hahnemann Medical College, who looks like Harold Lloyd and has nuisance value among anthropologists because of his irritating lectures, was in fine, irritating fettle. He shocked his colleagues by declaring the whole concept of race to be "utterly erroneous and meaningless." He declared that early naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon first tried to squeeze mankind into races according to complexion and other superficial traits, but anthropologists must now open their minds to the later discovery of genetic laws: Then the many differences among human groups will appear only as mutations within a single species. "Race" might perhaps have been redefined...
...small voice of comparative anatomy and paleontology, the facts plainly indicate that the skeletons of both the horse and his rider, however much they differ in details, are but divergent modifications of the old grappling bridge type. . . . This elementary but far-reaching fact, which was well understood by Buffon, Lamarck, Darwin and all later evolutionists, is to this day ignored by the vast majority of mankind, including the writers of many textbooks on human anatomy...