THE COMING OF EVOLUTION 191 



suggestive evidence to those who are accustomed to 

 labour in these directions. Yet embryology disclosed, 

 in the history of each indivdual, facts which were only 

 to be synthesized with infinite difficulty and after much 

 opposition, from the whole survey of animals, existing 

 and extinct, as mapped out by the students of natural 

 history. 



After Buffon had accomplished his great work of 

 description of the animal world, another Frenchman 

 Natural took up the subject of classification, 

 History, which always appeals to the Gallic mind, 

 and placed it on a clear and definite basis. Georges 

 Cuvier (1769-1832) was the son of a Protestant officer, 

 who had migrated from the Jura district into the 

 region of the Wurtemberg protectorate in consequence 

 of religious persecutions. He spent the period of 

 the Revolution and the Reign of Terror studying 

 peacefully in Normandy, and, at their close, returned 

 to Paris, where he soon occupied a foremost position 

 in the College de France. His great claim to distinc- 

 tion is due to the fact that, first among naturalists, 

 he compared systematically the structure of existing 

 mammals, fishes, and molluscs with that shown by the 

 remains of extinct fossil vertebrates and shells, so 

 that the past was taken into account, no less than the 

 present. Cuvier stands on the threshold of the new 

 age of scientific discovery, and his great book, Regne 

 animal distribue d'apr&s son organisation, forms a con- 

 necting link between the work of men who studied 

 the world and its phenomena as a stationary problem 

 and those who were impelled to see in it a transitory 

 stage of the great drama of evolution. 



