ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 247 



of history and the morphological changes of the earth ; 

 the other carried it into those small dimensions where 

 the unaided eye sees only sameness and repetition, but- 

 where the microscope reveals the hidden structure, the 

 internal and minute forms, of which living matter is 

 made up. 



I have already pointed out how the great travellers 

 of the second half of the eighteenth century Banks, 

 Pallas, and Humboldt carried the study of nature 

 beyond the narrow limits of the museum and the work- 

 room into the larger area of nature, of the present and 

 the past world. Camper in Holland, Hunter and Monro 

 in this country, Blumenbach and Soemmering in Ger- 

 many, Saussure in Geneva, towards the end of the eigh- 

 teenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century had 

 begun to unite these scattered discoveries and records 

 into something like order and system. It was again 



i T i 



the great merit of Cuvier to publish a monumental toiogy. 



1 Of the labours of other natural- 

 ists who preceded Cuvier, a very 

 full account will be found in a post- 

 humous work of Ducrotay de Blain- 

 ville, edited by M. Pol Nicard and 

 entitled ' Cuvier et Geoffrey Saint- 

 Hilaire ' (1890). The author, as is 

 well known, was for some time a 

 colleague and collaborator of Cu- 

 vier, with whom he fell out, partly 

 from personal reasons, partly owing 

 to the whole bent of his scientific 

 researches, which was much more 

 philosophical than that of Cuvier. 

 He had a very great appreciation 

 of Lamarck at a time when that 

 speculative naturalist was unknown 

 or treated with neglect, not to say 

 with ridicule. The criticisms of De 

 Blainville on Cuvier must be taken 

 with caution ; nevertheless his 



works and lectures had a great 

 influence on the development of 

 the more philosophical side of nat- 

 ural science in France, as many al- 

 lusions of Auguste Comte, Flourens, 

 Claude Bernard, &c., sufficiently 

 prove. In the chapter on Palaeont- 

 ology in the work on Cuvier (p. 

 380, &c.), De Blainville does full 

 justice to Camper, Blumenbach, 

 Soemmering, and other Continental 

 naturalists, with whose labours 

 Cuvier, through his German educa- 

 tion, was better acquainted than 

 his French colleagues. There is 

 also a significant remark of his 

 on the fact that Cuvier was essen- 

 tially a collector and dissector, 

 a man of the museum and the 

 library, not an outdoor naturalist 

 (p. 241). 



