Royal Society. 143 



from the corresponding parts of an individual of any other genus 

 or species. To a perfect naturalist, therefore, the inspection of 

 a bone, or any other part of an animal, would bring to his mind 

 the entire animal itself, and would identify it as perfectly as if 

 it was exhibited entire to his eye : this would be a triumph of 

 science to which our limited knowledge and faculties can never com- 

 pletely attain ; but it was to this point that Cuvier approximated, 

 when he reconstructed as it were the fossil animals of an antediluvian 

 world from the imperfect fragments which remained of them ; when 

 he showed in what such animals must have differed, and in what 

 they must have agreed, whether in magnitude or in kind, from the 

 animals which exist at present ; when he ventured in fact to define 

 their habits, and to write as it were the natural history of a former 

 world, by throwing upon its obscure and half-obliterated records, 

 the powerful light of science and philosophy. The Histoire den 

 Ossemens fossiles must ever remain a classical work to geologists ; 

 and the discoveries which it contains, and those to which it has led 

 in the hands of others, are some of the most interesting and extra- 

 ordinary with respect to the past ages of the world, which ob- 

 servations upon the surface of the globe have ever enabled us to 

 ascertain. 



The last great work upon which he was engaged was the Histoire 

 Naturelle des Poissons, a prodigious undertaking, of which eight 

 volumes have been published, and which he expected to extend to 

 twenty-five ; it was undertaken in conjunction with Messrs. Valen- 

 ciennes and Laurillard, to whom also he has bequeathed the task of 

 completing it. It will contain the description of 6000 species of 

 fish, 4000 of which had not been noticed in any other work.* 



Jean Antoine Chaptal, Compte de Chanteloup, was born in 1756, 

 and died in April last in the 76th year of his age. He was Professor 

 of Chemistry at Montpeher before the Revolution, and was one of 

 the most active cultivators of chemical science before that event, 

 in conjunction with Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, Guyton de Mor- 

 veau, and the illustrious Lavoisier. In the year 1793, upon the 

 threatened invasion of France by the Allies, when saltpetre was not 

 to be procured in sufficient quantities for the manufacture of the 

 powder wanted by the French armies, he was invited by the Com- 



* A translation of the " Memoir on the JVlineralogical Geography of the 

 Environs of Paris," by Cuvier and Brongniart, which is an abstract of the 

 work on that subject prefixed to the Hist, des Oss. foss. (see our last Num. 

 her, p. 52,) appeared in Phil. Mag. vol. xxxv. p. 36 ; and translations of 

 the following memoirs, also forming part of Cuvier's great work, were given 

 in that and other volumes ; viz. " On the Fossil Bones of Horses and Wild 

 Boars," lb. p. 215; " On the Osteology of the one-horned Rhinoceros," 

 vol. xix. p. 350; ,J On the Osteology of Living and Fossil Elephants," vols. 

 xxvi. and xxx. ; and " On the Osteology of Reptiles," vol. Ixv. p. 447. A 

 Report, by Haliy, Lelievre and Cuvier, on M. Andre's "Theory of the 

 actual Surface of the Earth," was given in vol. xxxiii. p. 170 ; Cuvier'* 

 " Report on Delaroche's Memoir on the Air-bladder of Fishes," in vol. 

 xxxv. p. 291 ; and his Report " On a paper by M. Flourens on the Nervous 

 System," in vol. lxi. p. 114. — Edit. 



