APPENDIX. 321 



Without wishing to pass any judgment in the present 

 place on the labours of Geoffroy, or to assign to them 

 the rank which they merit, a few general remarks may 

 afford a more exact idea of their nature. His works 

 are very numerous, and, to judge by their titles, one 

 might be tempted to believe that there was no connection 

 between them. Such, however, is not the case. Amongst 

 all these memoirs, which are dispersed in almost all the 

 scientific periodicals of that epoch, there are scarcely any 

 which have not been undertaken with the view of demon- 

 strating or of verifying some principle or some general 

 idea ; and all these principles and ideas were comprised 

 by Geoffroy in the fundamental thought of the unity of 

 the organic plan of the animal kingdom. We may there- 

 fore form some idea of the immense range of the observa- 

 tions and researches to which he devoted himself 



has applied to the class of Mammalia, Having for a long time been 

 placed at the head of the Menagerie of the Museum, M. Isidore 

 Geoffroy has necessarily been led to occupy himself with many 

 practical questions, and it is to him especially that we owe the found- 

 ation of the Societe pour V Acdbnatation des Animaux utiles. 



f M. Serres. a member of the Institute, and professor at the 

 Jardin des Plantes, is at the present time the leader of the school 

 of transcendental anatomy in France. He has published several 

 important works, in which the fundamental idea is that all higher 

 animals pass through all the inferior grades of being before they 

 arrive at their definite state : thus, for instance, man is considered 

 to have begun as an infusorial monad, becoming successivelj^ a 

 mollusc, an articulate animal, a fish, a reptile, a bird, an ordinary 

 mammal, and finally a man. In this theory, which was taught as 

 early as 1796 by Kielmaier, a professor at Tubingen, embryology 

 is a true transitory comparative anatomy, while comparative ana- 

 tomy is a permanent embryology. Without wishing to discuss the 

 value of these views, we may observe that M. Serres has displayed 

 much talent and ingenuity in their support. The principal works 

 in which this author has expounded his doctrines are VAnatomie 

 Comparee du Cerveau and h Precis d'Anatomie Transcendante. 

 VOL. I. Y 



