1832.] Cuvier and his Cabinet. 661 



and such a forehead as Spurzheim might adore. The eyes, however, are 

 singularly inexpressive; There is no sparkle, no glitter in that mind. Its 

 peculiarity consists in the immensity and the store of the intellectual man- 

 sions, I should add, in its internal order, for what is abundance without 

 arrangement. Cuvier's head is enormous : so is his neck ; the circum- 

 ference of its envelope might equal that of a well-grown tree. This gives 

 him a singular awkwardness of gait, the nether man being obliged to make 

 mighty and unequal efforts to carry the weight of the upper or intellectual 

 ditto. 



It is impossible not to recur to the extreme singularity and simplicity of 

 his cabinet. In a corresponding place, beneath another light, stands a 

 table, equally fenced in by screens, as the pupitre of the professor. There 

 sit his two acolytes, dissecting, putting the bones and parts of animal 

 mechanism together, or else taking them asunder, with precisely the same 

 aid of glass and intentness as watchmakers employ. Behind them is a 

 huge, rude stove, which an old, sturdy, and silent domestic is feeding 

 with logs. Opposite to it extends a sofa, but not for fair or scientific 

 visitor. The skeleton of a young whale occupies all of it that books do 

 not encumber. In every direction lie relics of all that is least perishable 

 in life, at least in physical life. Curious specimens of the animal kingdom 

 from distant parts of the world, from Thibet and the Andes, and the great 

 deep. Here are the cetaceous and the mammifer side by side ; the enor- 

 mous charpente, the carpentry, as the French express it, of the mammoth, 

 contrasted with some specimen equally curious in the diminutive. It was 

 the opening scene of Faustus realized, did but the spirits of earth and air 

 appear to the aged philosopher. 



Alas ! whilst I write, the tidings come that he has gone to join them. 

 Cuvier is no more, and his departure has left a gap in science that centu- 

 ries may not fill up. How death hath been prone of late to level his scythe 

 at the lords of intellect. In science alone, how quick and great have been 

 our lopes : Wollaston, and Davy, and Young, carried off in a single year. 

 Whilst France loses almost at once Champollim and Cuvier. I little 

 thought on commencing this sketch of the great natural philosopher, that 

 a few days would convert it into an article of necrology. 



Cuvier was born in 1769, that great year for giving birth to genius, at 

 Montbeliard, in the south-east of France, near the Jura. His father was 

 an officer in a Swiss regiment, and destined his son to his own profes- 

 sion. But young Cuvier was too studious, and too successful in his class 

 to be diverted from learning. He resolved to go into the church. The 

 little county of Montbeliard, though now a part of the French territory, was 

 then more German than French. It belonged to Wirtemberg, and Stutt- 

 gard, not Paris, was its metropolis. This circumstance had considerable 

 and fortunate influence upon Cuvier, since, making him both German and 

 French, it early communicated to him that largeness and universality in 

 his scientific views, which he might have wanted had he belonged exclu- 

 sively to either country. He went from Montbeliard to the university of 

 Stuttgard, where Schiller happened to be his fellow student. And here he 

 gave himself up principally to the study of natural history. From the 

 university he went as tutor to a noble family of Normandy, where the sea- 

 coast, seen by him for the first time, attracted all his curiosity and atten- 

 tion as a naturalist. It was some discoveries made here, since improvements 

 in the classification, I believe, of the worm tribe, that set him in corre- 



