OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 2/ 



duct do to the warmest esteem and respect of all friends to 

 science. 



The zoologists of France still exhibit that activity and 

 acuteness, by which the science has been so much benefitedj 

 and by which it receives, every year, important acquisitions. 

 CuviER has terminated his labours on the mollusca, by the 

 anatomy of the cuttle-fish tribe ; and has published toge- 

 ther, in one volume, with thirty-two beautifully engraved 

 plates, containing a very large number of figures from his 

 own drawings, the whole of his important researches on 

 this department of the animal kingdom. Those who are 

 acquainted with this admirable work ; who have appreciated 

 the immense extent and variety of the researches on which 

 it is founded, and the satisfactory clearness and accuracy 

 both of all its details, and of the general conclusions and 

 arrangements founded on them, will be astonished to hear 

 that its author has executed a series of investigations equally 

 extensive on the vertebral animals, the zoophytes, on many 

 insects and Crustacea. He has not published them in the 

 same way ; but the preparations are deposited in the cabinet 

 of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des PI antes, and will 

 be employed ultimately in that great work on comparative 

 anatomy, to which all the previous and apparently finished 

 productions of this philosophical and accomplished zoologist 

 are regarded by himself merely as a kind of prelude ; al- 

 though any one out of their great number would have raised 

 its author to a distinguished rank in the scientific world. 



This history and anatomy of the mollusca is not the only 

 claim which Cuvier has to our gratitude within the past 

 year. His work on the animal kingdom, in four volumes 

 octavo, exhibits a methodical and philosophical view of the 

 science of zoology : it places before us a subject capable of 

 engaging and satisfying an inquiring mind ; not a dry and 

 uninteresting detail of names and forms, but the philoso- 

 phical principles of zoological arrangement, and the execu- 

 tion of those principles through all their details : it esta- 

 blishes the divisions and subdivisions of the living world 

 through the whole of the vast scale, on the double basis of 



