2 M. Flourens's Historical Eloge on 



the College of Montbeliard ; but the period of the develop- 

 ment of his genius had not as yet arrived ; of these his early- 

 studies, he saw only the dry and uninviting side ; and, finally, 

 he abandoned them altogether, and became apprentice to a 

 watchmaker. He had a strong bias towards mechanics ; and 

 his curiosity, which the ordinary studies of college had not 

 excited, was roused to the highest pitch by an experiment in 

 physics, or the examination of a new machine. It is not easy 

 to conjecture the celebrity to which this bent might have raised 

 him, had not more influential circumstances diverted his at- 

 tention from mechanics and directed it to natural history. 



These circumstances naturally sprang from his connection 

 with his illustrious brother George, who, after the most bril- 

 liant career, first at the college of Montbeliard, and afterwards 

 at the university of Stuttgard, and also, after three yeai's spent 

 at Fecamp, a small town in Normandy, " an milieu, 1 ' to use 

 his own expression, already quoted in his Eloge,* " des pro- 

 ductions les plus variees que le mer et la terre semblaient lui 

 offrir a l'envi," arrived in the year 1795 in Paris. He at this 

 date published his memoir upon the distribution of TVhite- 

 blooded animals ; and the following year his memoir on Fossil 

 Elephants. By the first of these he effected a revolution in 

 zoology ; and in the second he announced his grand views con- 

 cerning the animals which had been destroyed by the revolu- 

 tions of our globe, and this at the age of twenty-six and 

 twenty-seven ; manifestations of a genius which astonished as 

 much by its precocity as its splendour, and whose first two 

 efforts, at the close of the eighteenth century, called into ex- 

 istence those two branches of natural history which most en- 

 gage the attention of the naturalists of the nineteenth, viz. 

 palceontology, and the anatomy of the invertebrate animals ; so 

 that of this man we may say what Fontenelle remarked of 

 Newton, " Qu'il n'a pas ete donne aux hommes de voir le Nil 

 faible et naissant." How rapidly these great works raised 

 Cuvier to the most honourable distinctions of science, is well 

 known. The Academie, the Jar din des Plantes, and the Col- 



* See Eloge Historique de Georges Cuvier : Memoires de l'Acadeniic des 

 Sciences, t. xiv. 



