Biographical Memoir of M. Daubenton. 13 



The bare enumeration of them would exceed the limits of a 

 discourse like the present ; and we shall content ourselves with 

 briefly mentioning the principal discoveries with which he has 

 enriched several departments of human knowledge. 



In zoology, Daubenton discovered five species of bats * and 

 a sorex -f, which had escaped the notice of other naturalists, al- 

 though all pretty common in France. He gave a complete de- 

 scription of the species of small deer which produces the musk, 

 and made some curious remarks on its organization J. He de- 

 scribed a singular conformation in the organs of the voice in some 

 foreign birds ||. He was the first who applied the knowledge of 

 comparative anatomy to the determination of the species of quad- 

 rupeds whose remains are met with in a fossil state ; and al- 

 though he was not always happy in his conjectures, he never- 

 theless opened an important field of investigation in the history 

 of the revolutions of the globe ; he destroyed for ever those ri- 

 diculous ideas of giants, which had been renewed by each suc- 

 cessive discovery of the remains of some great animal §. 



His most remarkable achievement of this kind, was the deter- 

 mination of a bone, which was kept at the Garde Meuble 

 as the leg-bone of a giant. He discovered, by means of com- 

 parative anatomy, that it could only be the radius of a giraffe, 

 although he had never seen that animal, and although no figure 

 of its skeleton existed. He had the pleasure of verifying his 

 conjecture himself, when, thirty years after, the museum pro- 

 cured the skeleton of that animal which it still possesses. 



Before his time there were only vague ideas respecting the 

 differences between man and the orang-outang. Some consider- 

 ed that animal as a wild man ; others went so far as to main- 

 tain that it was man who had degenerated, and that his nature 

 is to go on four feet. Daubenton proved, by an ingenious and 

 decisive observation on the articulation of the head, that man 

 could not walk otherwise than on two feet, or the orang-outang 

 otherwise than on four ^. 



In vegetable physiology, he was the first who called the atten- 



• Memoires de TAcademie des Sciences, lor 1759, p. 61. 



t Ibid, for 1766, p. 203. + Ibid, for 1772, second part, p. 216. 



II Ibid, for 1781, p. 369. § Ibid, for 1762, p. 206. 



i[ Ibid, for 1764, p. 668. 



