400 NINETEENTH CENTURY. FT. III. 



to serve different purposes in different animals; and that 

 Cuvier showed that each part of an animal agrees with the 

 rest so perfectly that from a few bones it is possible to tell 

 exactly what animals had lived and died in past ages. 



Geoffrey St-.Hilaire outlived both his friends, and died in 

 1840. Lamarck had died in 1829, in his eighty-fifth year, 

 having been blind for many years. Cuvier died on May 13, 

 1832. On the Tuesday previous he had begun his third course 

 of lectures on Natural Science at the College de France, and 

 had promised to give in that course his idea of creation, and 

 how the Divine Intelligence is to be traced through all the 

 operations of nature j but the promise remained unfulfilled ; 

 that same evening paralysis set in, and on the next Sunday 

 he died in his arm-chair as if he had fallen asleep. He had 

 begged to be buried privately, but that was impossible ; on 

 hearing of his death men of science flocked from all parts to 

 do him the last honour, and his pupils bore him to the grave. 



Von Baer, the Founder of the Study of Embryology. 

 1828. We must not leave this question of the structure of 

 animals without noticing in passing a new and important study 

 which began about this time. This was the study of embryo- 

 logy, or of animals in the earliest stages of their life, as in the 

 case of the chicken before it leaves the egg. You know that 

 if you take a bird's egg when it is newly laid, you will see 

 inside it a yellow yolk floating in a white fluid. But if you 

 take the egg after the mother-bird has sat upon it for some 

 days, the yolk will begin to have the form of a bird, and if 

 you were to take a dozen eggs of one brood of chickens and 

 crack one every few days while the mother was sitting upon 

 them, each one would be more like a chicken than the last, 

 until the twelfth, if you opened it just about the time when it 

 ought to be hatched, would be a perfect chicken, only that its 



