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It is, however, chiefly as a naturalist that Cuvier must be viewed,, 

 when we seek to determine his permanent rank amongst the few 

 great men who have effected great revolutions in the sciences which 

 they have cultivated, or have left ineffaceable traces of the influence 

 of their discoveries behind them. The whole animal kingdom, from 

 the most obscure indications of the separation between inanimate and 

 animate existence to the mighty monsters of a former world, has as- 

 sumed under his hands a systematic arrangement, not founded upon 

 superficial and unimportant external characters merely, but upon 

 a most careful and laborious observation of the analogies of internal 

 structure. By tracing every organ successively through the whole 

 series of animals; by carefully determining the functions of such 

 organs and their relations to each other; and by considering them in 

 every animal in the first place as an individual, and in the second 

 place with reference to others, he has been enabled to distribute 

 them into species and genera, and families and classes, where every 

 successive step in their arrangement is the result of a legitimate and 

 inductive generalization. It is by such means that he has been ena- 

 bled to convert the science of natural history, at least in the animal 

 kingdom, from being little more than a systematic classification, 

 formed for the purpose of identifying genera and species and with 

 no higher view, into a science of strict and severe induction, founded 

 upon a careful observation and comparison of every fact which ana- 

 tomical and physiological science can detect, and thus to confer upon 

 it a dignity which is only inferior to that of the physical sciences. 



It has resulted also, from his researches, that every animal 

 considered as one of the same genus or species, is not only an 

 individual considered as a whole, but also when considered in 

 all its parts ; in other words, that every bone, every muscle, every 

 organ, and every part of its structure is essentially distinguished 

 from the corresponding parts of an individual of any other genus 

 or species. To a perfect naturalist, therefore, the inspection of 

 a bone, or any other part of an animal, would bring to his mind 

 the entire animal itself, and would identify it as perfectly as if 

 it was exhibited entire to his eye : this would be a triumph of 

 science to which our limited knowledge and faculties can never com- 

 pletely attain ; but it was to this point that Cuvier approximated, 

 when he reconstructed as it were the fossil animals of an antediluvian 

 world from the imperfect fragments which remained of them ; when 

 he showed in what such animals must have differed, and in what 

 they must have agreed, whether in magnitude or in kind, from the 

 animals which exist at present ; when he ventured in fact to define 

 their habits, and to write as it were the natural history of a former 

 world, by throwing upon its obscure and half-obliterated records 

 the powerful light of science and philosophy. The Histoire des 

 Ossemens fossiles must ever remain a classical work to geologists ; 

 and the discoveries which it contains, and those to which it has led 

 in the hands of others, are some of the most interesting and extra- 

 ordinary with respect to the past ages of the world, which ob- 



