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ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



Cuvier (1769-1832) of Paris. It is true that some of his pred- 

 ecessors had reached a broad viewpoint in anatomical study but 

 Cuvier's claim to fame rests on the remarkable breadth of his in- 

 vestigations — his survey of the comparative anatomy of the whole 

 series of animal forms. And not content merely with the living, he 

 made himself the first real master of the anatomy of fossil Verte- 

 brates, as his contemporary Lamarck was of fossil Invertebrates. 

 (Figs. 232, 297, 309.) 



Cuvier's grasp of anatomy was due to his emphasizing, as Aris- 

 totle had done before him, the functional unity of the organism: 



Fig. 297. — Georges Cuvier. 



that the interdependence of organs results from the interdepend- 

 ence of function : that structure and function are two aspects of the 

 living machine which go hand in hand. Cuvier's famous principle 

 of correlation — "Give me a tooth," said he, "and I will construct 

 the whole animal " — is really an outcome of this viewpoint. Every 

 change of function involves a change in structure and, therefore, 

 given extensive knowledge of function and of the interdependence 

 of function and structure, it is possible to infer from the form of one 

 organ that of most of the other organs of an animal. But Cuvier 

 undoubtedly allowed himself to exaggerate his guiding principle 

 until it exceeded the bounds of fact. 



Among Cuvier's immediate successors, Owen (1804-1892) of 

 London perhaps demands special mention. He spent a long life 



