138 NATURAL HISTORY. 



School of the Pantheon, and in the same year he was 

 elected assistant to Mertrud, the aged incumbent of the 

 new chair of comparative anatomy at the Muse'e d'Histoire 

 Naturelle. 



Cuvier was now fairly launched upon that course of 

 incessant scientific activity which only terminated with 

 his life. In the year of his arrival at Paris (1795) he not 

 only opened his first course of lectures at the Jardin des 

 Plantes, but he published a number of researches on 

 various departments of natural history, such as the 

 structure of the lower larynx in birds, the anatomy of 

 the Roman Snail (Helix pomatia), the circulation of the 

 Invertebrata, the structure and classification of the 

 Mollusca (always a favourite study), and the classification 

 of the Invertebrata generally. In the course of the next 

 year Cuvier was elected a member of the newly-founded 

 National Institute, and was associated with Lacepede and 

 Daubenton as the nucleus of the section ' Zoology/ His 

 scientific activity suffered no abatement, and in this year 

 he published a further series of memoirs, of which three 

 are particularly interesting, as showing the first beginnings 

 of his palaeontological labours. One of the papers in 

 question dealt with the skeleton of one of the huge 

 extinct American ground-sloths, the Megalonyx, which had 

 previously been regarded as a carnivorous animal, but 

 which Cuvier showed to be truly a gigantic relative of 

 the existing sloths of South America. Another memoir 

 treated of the Megatherium, another extinct ground-sloth ; 

 and the third was concerned with the skulls of the cave- 

 bear, which had been found in the famous cavern of 

 Gailenreuth. 



