Marie-Henri Ducrotay de Blainville. 133 



Vertebrate Classes," being elaborate treatises which might 

 well have cost a zoologist the labour of a life. 



The " Osteography," published in 1839-40, comprised the 

 extinct as well as living types of vertebrate animals, and is 

 the most important of those contributions to Palaeontology 

 which gave him a title to be enrolled as one of our foreign 

 members. M. de Blainville was himself a good artist, and the 

 figures of the skulls and skeletons of nearly all the orders of 

 mammalia which illustrate this treatise, are regarded by many 

 eminent zoologists as the most accurate hitherto published. 



In a controversy into which M. de Blainville entered, re- 

 specting the place in the animal kingdom to be assigned to 

 the celebrated fossils of the Stonesfield oolite, he opposed 

 the previously declared opinion of Cuvier, that they were 

 true insectivorous mammals, and was inclined to believe in 

 their reptilian character, — an opinion from which the most 

 skilful comparative anatomists of Europe dissent. But while 

 they decline to bow to his authority on this point, they do not 

 dispute the general soundness of his views, still less the ex- 

 traordinary range and profoundness of his knowledge of the 

 animal kingdom. 



" It was the great object of his life," says M. Prevost, 

 " to establish in all his works, especially in his * Osteology,' 

 the doctrine that the whole series of organic beings was in- 

 timately related, the links of one great chain, ascending from 

 the most simple organisms to that which occupies the highest 

 place ; in other words, from the Sponge to Man. But while 

 he endeavoured to refer all groups and every variety of animal 

 form to one and the same place, he never embraced the plau- 

 sible hypothesis that each higher grade had been improved 

 in the course of ages out of a lower one by transmutation ; 

 on the contrary, he saw in the whole animal creation, one 

 single operation, one great harmonious and divine idea, the 

 various changes being neither due to chance nor to the in- 

 fluence of external circumstances, but being all the result of 

 one and the same original conception.'* — Lybll. 



2. Pye Smith, D.D., F.B.S., Sfc. 

 Dr Pye Smith was President of the Protestant Dissenting 



