: Buffon applied it to individuals or series of individuals that diverged from their specific type;' a doctors also used it to designate that weakening of natural robust humanity that life in society, civilization, laws, and language condemn little by little to a life of artificiality and disease; to degenerate was to describe a decline from an original status, figuring by natural right at the summit of the hierarchy of perfections and times; in this notion is gathered up all that was most negative in the historical, the atypical, and the counternatural.