MEMOIR. Vii 
The extent to which the time of Cuvier was employed, in consequence 
of his appointments by Napoleon in political affairs, was such as to induce 
us to conclude that he found it necessary to abandon the pursuit of 
science. But the real truth appears to be, that, whilst he scrupulously 
fulfilled his obligations as a public functionary, he made the very occasions 
in which he was occupied in that capacity subservient to the one ulterior 
object of his life; and the affairs connected with the establishment of se- 
minaries in Marseilles and Bordeaux were only so many inducements to 
him to proceed to the sea shore, there to behold and to investigate his 
favourite department of the animal series—the Mollusca tribes. 
We have mentioned, that the labours of Cuvier in the department of 
comparative anatomy had been completed in 1805, by the publication of 
the three successive volumes as the sequel of the first two which appeared 
in 1800. The knowledge which he acquired by his labours in this de- 
partment proved the source of some of the most memorable triumphs of 
his genius; amongst which we may especially mention his grand re- 
searches on the fossil remains of the bones of animals. The history of 
the causes which led Cuvier to the investigation of the geology of the site 
of Paris is amongst the most curious and agreeable chapters in the annals 
of science. 
Up to a very recent period, not only in France, but also in England, 
the conclusions to which the celebrated German, Werner, had come, in 
the science of mineralogy, appeared to leave nothing to be done for the 
further elucidation of the knowledge of the crust of the earth. His sys- 
tem comprised, it was thought, the most perfect explanation of the whole 
series of the strata of that crust; and the scientific world seemed to think 
it a work of superfluity to attempt to add new facts to the series which 
that naturalist had collected in reference to this subject. But, as edu- 
cation, assisted by the progress of the habit of afree exertion of mind, 
scattered abroad the contagion of a disposition to inquiry, the scientific 
men of Paris began to acknowledge, that, in the very heart of their city, 
in every inch of the soil upon which they daily trod, they saw before them 
a series of geological structures, of which the supposed infallible apostle 
of mineralogy had certainly predicated nothing whatever. A nearer in- 
spection of the phenomena, which powerfully arrested their attention, 
brought them at last to the conviction, that either they were incapable of 
making a due application of the system of Werner, or that that system 
was altogether inadequate to expound the whole of what it undertook to 
explain with satisfaction. The savants of Paris, thus forced in self-de- 
fence to the task of inquiry, directed their own and their pupils’ attention 
to the German and Swiss mountains, and they were ultimately prevailed 
upon to render justice to science, through the influences which arose from 
