ANNIVEKSAEY ADDEESS OF THE PRESIDENT, 43 



rEANcois Louis Paul Geevais, whose numerous and valuable 

 writings must be familiar to all students of palaeontology. He was 

 born in Paris on the 24th September, 1816 ; and as early as the year 

 1835 he became assistant to De Blainville (who occupied the Chair 

 of Comparative Anatomy at the Paris Museum), and remained asso- 

 ciated with that great naturalist until 1845, when he was appointed 

 Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy to the Faculty of 

 Sciences of Montpellier. In 1865 Gervais was appointed Professor 

 at the Faculty of Sciences of Paris, and in 1868 Professor of Com- 

 parative Anatomy at the Museum, a position which he held until 

 his death on the 10th Pebruary, 1879. He was a Doctor of Sciences 

 and of Medicine, a correspondent of the Institute of Prance (since 

 1861), and a corresponding member of many Societies. He was one 

 of the earliest Poreign Correspondents of this Society ,(1863), and 

 was elected a Poreign Member in 1875. 



During his early association with De Blainville, Gervais assisted 

 him in the preparation of his great work, the ' Osteographie ;' but 

 the bent of his mind at this time appears to have been towards the 

 study of those groups of animals included by Linnaeus in his order 

 " Insecta Aptera," and especially of the Myriopoda, upon which he 

 began to write as early as the year 1835. He was, in consequence, 

 selected to complete and supplement the great work on the Aptera 

 (Spiders, Scorpions, Myriopoda, and true apterous Insects) com- 

 menced by Baron Walckenaer in the ' Suites a Buffon,' of which he 

 wrote the third and fourth volumes, published in 1844 and 1847. 



In numerous memoirs published in various periodicals, and in 

 the natural-history appendices to voyages, Professor Gervais treated 

 of animals belonging to nearly all the principal groups, and he also 

 published ^Elements de Zoologie' in 1866 (of which a second 

 edition appeared in 1871), and, in conjunction with Yan Beneden, 

 a 'Zoologie Medicale ' in 1859. During the whole of this period, 

 however, his attention was being more and more directed towards 

 the vertebrata, recent and fossil, especially the Mammalia ; and it 

 is mainly upon his researches on the latter that his fame as a 

 palaeontologist will rest. In 1854 and 1855 he produced his 

 'Histoire ISTaturelle des Mammiferes,' in two large 8vo volumes, 

 giving an excellent semipopular description of the structure and 

 habits of the recent Mammalia, with references to all the fossil 

 forms of which any thing definite was at that time known. In his 

 ' Zoologie et Paleontologie Pran^aises,' published in tw o 4to volumes 

 between 1848 and 1852, and of which a second edition appeared 

 in 1859, the Mammalia occupy by far the largest share of the 

 space ; and this is also the case with the ' Zoologie et Paleonto- 

 logie generales,' although in both these books fossil birds and 

 reptiles receive more or less of the author's attention. In the 

 last-mentioned work we find important researches upon the fossil 

 mammals of South America, to which Professor Gervais had already 

 devoted a special memoir, under the title of ' llecherches sur les 

 Mammiferes fossiles de 1' Am erique meridionale,' published in 1855. 

 By these great works, and numerous smaller memoirs published in 



