'S^^ Cuvier as a Naturalist. 



When he arrived in Normandy in 1788, the facilities which 

 his vicinity to the sea afforded him, gave rise to the desire of 

 studying its productions. He first examined the animals of the 

 class Vermes of Linnaeus, but finding difficulty in determining 

 the species and even the genera, as then established, he inquired 

 "whether their internal structure might not supply more precise 

 characters ; and the necessity of classifying the facts which he 

 ascertained, soon made him sensible that it was impossible to 

 assign any common character to these animals, and that a de- 

 sideratum in zoology therefore remained to be supplied. 



Linnaeus and BufFon had made science popular ; the one by 

 rendering it of easy attainment, the other by giving it a philo- 

 sophical character, and investing it with all the fascinations of 

 eloquence ; but this very popularity having been the means of 

 enriching it to a great extent, a method of classification becatoe 

 indispensable ; and as the systems founded on a single organ 

 could not lead to an arrangement of animals according to their 

 affinities, M. Cuvier conceived it necessary to apply to zoology 

 principles analogous to those of the natural method, recently 

 employed with so much success in botany, and which consist in 

 " distributing the facts of which a science is composed in propor- 

 tions, so graduated and arranged in their generahties, that when 

 taken together they will express the real relations of beings *." 



dered as representing, among naturalists, the Peripatetic school, in its method 

 of observing facts, comparing them, and thence deducing general principles ; 

 whilst Kielmeyer is the founder of a metaphysical school, closely resembling 

 the academic^ inasmuch as it admits the independent existence of general 

 ideas. In him, then, we find another Aristotle, disciple of another Plato, each 

 pursuing a tract as distinct as that of the Greek philosophers. 



• Cuvier, Rapport historique sur les Progres des Sciences Naturelles^ Paris, 

 1810, p. 304. Such was not the method in the Linnean system, which 

 was defective especially as it regarded the lower animals. Vertebral ani- 

 mals divide themselves so naturally into classes, that an instinctive feel- 

 ing has led all zoologists since the time of Aristotle, to recognise those 

 which prevail even at present ; but resting only on this feeling, which rea- 

 sons not, and therefore never inquires after the foundation of its appre- 

 hensions, this natural division of the classes had never been carried further ; 

 the subdivisions into orders and families required observations and reflections, 

 which had not generally been made. A better distribution of the mammi- 

 ferae, though still incomplete, had been proposed by Storr ; but the other 

 vertebral animals required a reformer to arrange them, as much as the inver- 

 tebral. Their forms being much more varied, analog, neither by reflection. 



