BARON CUVIER. ^65 



it would be difficult to decide whether the place 

 which gave him birth, or that which was the 

 scene of his labours, has the best title to call him 

 her own.* His family, as we see in the pre- 

 vious pages of these memoirs, was originally 

 Swiss ; and, being driven to Montbeliard in con- 

 sequence of professing the reformed faith, set- 

 tled there as a remote province of Germany, 

 and where some of the members of it held im- 

 portant charges. His uncle was a minister of 

 the Lutheran religion, and his father an officer 

 in a Swiss regiment then in the service of France. 

 I am led to dwell on these two circumstances, 

 from errors committed by several writers, who 

 have stated M. Cuvier to have entered the 

 church ; and also a mistake made by M. Decan- 

 dolle, a very old and esteemed friend of M. 

 Cuvier, and the learned botanist of Geneva. 

 This gentleman asserts, in his funeral 61oge of 

 M. Cuvier, that the latter entered the army, 

 which assertion is wholly without foundation ; 



* The year in which M. Cuvier was born was a remark- 

 able one, for in it Napoleon Buonaparte came into the world, 

 who made as great a revolution in the political face of Europe, 

 as M. Cuvier did in that of science, though not equally lasting. 

 The Duke of Wellington, Mr. Canning, M. de Chateaubriand, 

 Sir Walter Scott, Sir James Mackintosh, alike drew their first 

 breath in this year. 



