Cuvier as a Naturalist. 349 



He has no doubt availed himself of every author who has treat- 

 ed of animal anatomy ; he has profited by the works of Swam- 

 merdam, Collins, Monro, Hunter, Camper, Blumenbach, Dau- 

 benton, Vicq-d'Azyr, and many others; but a multitude of 

 new and important facts are due to himself, and what is pecu- 

 liarly his own, is the elevated manner of considering the subject, 

 the vigorous precision with which he traces one organ through 

 the whole series of animals, the patience he displays in marking 

 their differences and the effects which they ought to produce, 

 his logical accuracy in deducing only such consequences as flow 

 directly from the facts, without giving way to the seductions of 

 a system ; and finally, that perspicacity and condensation, of which 

 he has given a striking proof by comprehending in a single lec- 

 ture on animal economy, the substance of many volumes written 

 on the subject. 



The principal physiological ideas which this, as well as the 

 other works of M. Cuvier, contains, are that life is a iourbillon 

 of a certain matter under a determinate form ; that the princi- 

 pal agent of it is an imponderable fluid, the nervous fluid ; that 

 the sensation and reproduction of living beings are subjects in- 

 comprehensible to us ; and that instinct is an internal sensation, 

 a sort of somnambulism which determines certain animals to exe- 

 cute, in a state of ignorance, actions often very complicated, 

 without having been taught by others or by experience.* 



If the anatomy of the molluscae led M. Cuvier to reform 

 zoological systems, the anatomy of the vertebrate animals occa- 

 sioned the discovery of an order of facts, even more fruitful in 

 brilliant results for natural philosophy and the theory of the 

 earth. 



Considering that an organized being forms a complete system, 

 destined by nature for a certain purpose, and of which all the 

 parts are intimately connected with each other, he conceived that 



• M. Cuvier, considering that all organized beings are produced by genera- 

 tion, and hot seeing in nature any power capable of producing organization, 

 believed in the pre-existence of germs ; not in the pre-existence of a being 

 fully formed, because it is very evident that it is only by successive develop- 

 ments that an animal acquires its form : but if it may be so expressed, in the 

 pre-existence of the radicle of a being, a radicle which exists before the Qom. 

 mencement of the series of evolutions, and which certainly mounts up, accord- 

 ing to the interesting observations of Bonnet, to at least many generations. 



VOL. XIV. NO. XXXII. — APRIL 1834. A a 



