INTRODUCTION TO THE FIEST EDITION. XV 



not mentioned or spoken of aloud. The sciences I speak of 

 were merely permitted to exist under a withered and degraded 

 form ; and a faculty which never ought to have had a place 

 in any university, came at last in some to play a prominent 

 part ; as if to complete the misapprehensions of true science, 

 it required only to add to these the mechanical art of surgery; 

 and this of course followed : nor could it have been otherwise 

 in a country where constants are alone looked on as valuable, 

 applicative, productive ; industrial facts bearing on the great 

 questions of profit and loss direct, immediate, are alone 

 esteemed. 



Generally speaking, the continental universities resisted 

 this pollution: they refused all association with faculties, 

 medical or otherwise, and more especially that of France ; 

 access to the scientific departments of the army was closed, 

 by the rigorous education and examination of the Polytechnic 

 School, to all who had not mastered the elements at least of 

 natural science ; whilst of the aspirant for the diploma of 

 medicine a first university degree was demanded. Now that 

 degree the candidate could not obtain if ignorant of those 

 branches of knowledge which constitute Natural History. 

 The necessity produced a want, namely, a brief manual of 

 instruction suited to such a case ; the want was supplied in 

 respect of Zoology by my friend M. Milne Edwards, whose 

 work in an English dress I now present to the public ; 

 the botanical manual was the work of a descendant of the 

 illustrious Jussieu; the miueralogical and geological by 

 Beudarit : the three comprising all Natural History, properly 

 so called. 



But of one thing I am thoroughly convinced. This im- 

 proved condition of education, even in France, was the result 

 of accident, of the accidental appearance in France of a man 

 destined to revolutionize all zoological science, viewed under 

 every possible aspect that man was George Cuvier. To be 

 convinced of the truth of this view, we have but rapidly to 

 trace the history of Zoology from the period of the immortal 



