14 



PRINCIPLES OF ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



the standard of comparison was not man but the lower animals. He 

 had begun his biological career by studying marine animals; and, while ho 

 later went over almost wholly to the vertebrates, he never, as did the 

 medically trained anatomists before him, adopted man as the starting 

 point for comparison. Paleontology also traces its origin to Cuvier, 

 since his comparative studies were extended to fossils, especially to the 

 elephantlike forms, the mastodons. 



It is curious that Cuvier, who was forcibly brought face to face with 

 the evolution theory, never saw fit to embrace it. His discoveries in 

 comparative anatomy are now regarded as indicating kinship of various 



Fig. 9. — Georges Cuvier, 1769-1832. {From Locy, "Biology and Its Makers.") 



animals, and the fossils he studied clearly demonstrate that living things 

 of successive ages were of very unlike kinds. Cuvier chose to explain 

 these successive types of beings by catastrophes, which destroyed all 

 life, and subsequent recreation of new kinds of beings. He was not 

 merely passive in rejecting the evolution doctrine but actively opposed 

 it. In a series of discussions participated in by him and Geoffroy St. 

 Hilaire before the French Academy of Sciences in 1830, his opposition was 

 repeatedly stated. Cuvier, who was an excellent debater and very 

 influential, was then generally held to have won this debate. 



The Cell Theory. — The comparative method of study was applied to 

 smaller and smaller objects as rapidly as moans of doing so were available. 

 Further progress in the improvement of the microscope (such as the first 

 production of achromatic lenses about 1827), after a period of nearly 



