or genus, Buffelus. In Assam there formerly existed a local race, B. bubalis macrocercus, characterized by the horns, which are of immense size, being directed mainly outwards, instead of curving upwards in a circular form. Another Assam race (B. bubalis fulvus) is characterized by the tawny, in place of black, colour of its hair and hide. The haunts of the Indian buffalo are the grass-jungles near swamps, in which the grass exceeds 20 ft. in height. Here the buffaloes—like the Indian rhinoceros—form covered pathways, in which they are completely concealed. The herds frequently include fifty or more individuals. These animals are fond of passing the day in marshes, where they love to wallow in the mud; they are by no means shy, and do much harm to the crops. The rutting-season occurs in autumn, when several females follow a single male, forming for the time a small herd. The period of gestation lasts for ten months, and the female produces one or two calves at a birth. The bull is capable, it is said, of overthrowing an elephant, and generally more than a match even for the tiger, which usually declines the combat when not impelled by hunger. The Indian driver of a herd of tame buffaloes does not shrink from entering a tiger-frequented jungle, his cattle, with their massive horns, making short work of any tiger that may come in their way. Buffalo fights and fights between buffaloes and tigers were recognized Indian sports in the old days. Domesticated buffaloes differ from their wild brethren merely by their inferior size and smaller horns; some of the latter being of the circular and others of the straight type. The milk is good and nourishing, but of a ropy consistency and a peculiar flavour.
The tamarao, or Philippine buffalo, Bos (Bubalus) mindorensis, is a smaller animal, in many respects intermediate between the Indian buffalo and the dwarf anoa, or Celebes buffalo (B. depressicornis). (R. L.*)
BUFFET, LOUIS JOSEPH (1818–1898), French statesman, was born at Mirecourt. After the revolution of February 1848 he was elected deputy for the department of the Vosges, and in the Assembly sat on the right, pronouncing for the repression of the insurrection of June 1848 and for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He was minister of agriculture from August to December 1849 and from August to October 1851. Re-elected deputy in 1863, he was one of the supporters of the “Liberal Empire” of Emile Ollivier, being finance minister in Ollivier’s cabinet from January to the 10th of April 1870. He was president of the National Assembly from the 4th of April 1872 to the 10th of March 1875, and minister of the interior in 1875. Then, elected senator for life (1876), he pronounced himself in favour of the coup d’état of the 16th of May 1877. Buffet had some oratorical talent, but shone most in opposition.
BUFFET, a piece of furniture which may be open or closed, or partly open and partly closed, for the reception of dishes, china, glass and plate. The word may also signify a long counter at which one stands to eat and drink, as at a restaurant, or—which would appear to be the original meaning—the room in which the counter stands. The word, like the thing it represents, is French. The buffet is the descendant of the credence, and the ancestor of the sideboard, and consequently has a close affinity to the dresser. Few articles of furniture, while preserving their original purpose, have varied more widely in form. In the beginning the buffet was a tiny apartment, or recess, little larger than a cupboard, separated from the room which it served either by a breast-high balustrade or by pillars. It developed into a definite piece of furniture, varying from simplicity to splendour, but always provided with one or more flat spaces, or broad shelves, for the reception of such necessaries of the dining-room as were not placed upon the table. The early buffets were sometimes carved with the utmost elaboration; the Renaissance did much to vary their form and refine their ornament. Often the lower part contained receptacles as in the characteristic English court-cupboard. The rage for collecting china in the middle of the 18th century was responsible for a new form—the high glazed back, fitted with shelves, for the display of fine pieces of crockery-ware. This, however, was hardly a true buffet, and was the very antithesis of the primary arrangement, in which the huge goblets and beakers and fantastic pieces of plate, of which so extremely few examples are left, were displayed upon the open “gradines.” The tiers of shelves, with or without a glass front, which are still often found in Georgian houses, were sometimes called buffets—in short, any dining-room receptacle for articles that were not immediately wanted came at last to bear the name. In France the variations of type were even more numerous than in England, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a commode from a buffet. In the latter part of the 18th century the buffet occasionally took the form of a console table.
BUFFIER, CLAUDE (1661–1737), French philosopher, historian and educationalist, was born in Poland, on the 25th of May 1661, of French parents, who returned to France, and settled at Rouen, soon after his birth. He was educated at the Jesuit college there, and was received into the order at the age of nineteen. A dispute with the archbishop compelled him to leave Rouen, and after a short stay in Rome he returned to Paris to the college of the Jesuits, where he spent the rest of his life. He seems to have been an admirable teacher, with a great power of lucid exposition. His object in the Traité des vérités premières (1717), his best-known work, is to discover the ultimate principle of knowledge. This he finds in the sense we have of our own existence and of what we feel within ourselves. He thus takes substantially the same ground as Descartes, but he rejected the a priori method. In order to know what exists distinct from the self, “common sense” is necessary. Common sense he defined as “that disposition which nature has placed in all or most men, in order to enable them, when they have arrived at the age and use of reason, to form a common and uniform judgment with respect to objects different from the internal sentiment of their own perception, which judgment is not the consequence of any anterior judgment.” The truths which this “disposition of nature” obliges us to accept can be neither proved nor disproved; they are practically followed even by those who reject them speculatively. But Buffier does not claim for these truths of “common sense” the absolute certainty which characterizes the knowledge we have of our own existence or the logical deductions we make from our thoughts; they possess merely the highest probability, and the man who rejects them is to be considered a fool, though he is not guilty of a contradiction. Buffier’s aversion to scholastic refinements has given to his writings an appearance of shallowness and want of metaphysical insight, and unquestionably he failed entirely even to indicate the nature of that universality and necessity which he ascribed to his “eternal verities”; he was, however, one of the earliest to recognize the psychological as distinguished from the metaphysical side of Descartes’s principle, and to use it, with no inconsiderable skill, as the basis of an analysis of the human mind, similar to that enjoined by Locke. In this he has anticipated the spirit and method as well as many of the results of Reid and the Scottish school. Voltaire described him as “the only Jesuit who has given a reasonable system of philosophy.”
He wrote also Éléments de métaphysique (1724), a “French Grammar on a new plan,” and a number of historical essays. Most of his works appeared in a collected form in 1732, and an English translation of the Traité was published in 1780.
BUFFON, GEORGE LOUIS LECLERC, Comte de (1707–1788), French naturalist, was born on the 7th of September 1707, at Montbard (Côte d’Or), his father, Benjamin François Leclerc de Buffon (1683–1775), being councillor of the Burgundian parlement. He studied law at the college of Jesuits at Dijon; but he soon exhibited a marked predilection for the study of the physical sciences, and more particularly for mathematics. Whilst at Dijon he made the acquaintance of a young Englishman, Lord Kingston, and with him travelled through Italy and then went to England. He published a French translation of Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Statics in 1735, and of Sir I. Newton’s Fluxions in 1740. At twenty-five years of age he succeeded to a considerable property, inherited from his mother, and from this time onward his life was devoted to regular scientific labour. At first he directed his attention more especially to mathematics, physics,
