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It is, therefore, to the doctrine of evolution his attention is principally directed. Nevertheless, he is no less struck by Darwin's way of excluding all intelligence and design in his manner of speaking of nature. On this point he quotes the language of Cuvier, who says: "Nature has been personified. Living beings have been called the works of nature.
Cuvier, the great French naturalist, says that the "dog is the most complete, the most remarkable, and the most useful conquest ever made by man." "Every species has become our property.
"If I am examined first, we are saved; if it is the boy, all is lost," said he to himself while he waited. His plight was so sore that the strong man's face was wet with white sweat. Indeed, this wonderful man saw as clearly in his sphere of crime as Moliere did in his sphere of dramatic poetry, or Cuvier in that of extinct organisms. Genius of whatever kind is intuition.
Look, said he, at the absurd decoration showered on the savans of France, Baron Cuvier, for instance; and he fell into a passion, and, being a French scholar, sang forth, in a paroxysm of gout, this refrain: "Travaillez, travaillez, bon tonnelier, Racommodez, racommodez, ton Cuvier." And yet he was by no means an ignorant man was at heart a true John Bull, and had travelled and seen the world.
From the first this odd conception had engaged my curiosity, purely for its fanciful side, and one evening, in alluding to it, I made the not very profound remark that Imagination had no anatomy. "They are true beasts," said Dinah. "They are the mastodons of Cuvier, no doubt; but, then, Cuvier never saw a mastodon, you know." "But I have; and I tell you Griset and Cuvier are very nearly right."
Cuvier on anatomical, and Von Baer on embryological grounds, made the further step of proving that, even in this limited sense, animals cannot be arranged in a single series, but that there are several distinct plans of organisation to be observed among them, no one of which, in its highest and most complicated modification, leads to any of the others.
While Cuvier and his followers traced these four distinct plans, as shown in the adult animal, Baer opened to us a new field of investigation in the embryology of the four types, showing that for each there was a special mode of growth in the egg.
In fact, He must have called up, or created for the purpose, some individuals of a school of physicists which had no existence till 1,800 years after His time. For, if He had called into existence such witnesses as Sir Isaac Newton, or Sir Humphrey Davy, or Cuvier, or Faraday, they would have fallen down and worshipped.
If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of cause and effect, astrology has a locus standi, and becomes what it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the closet.
Within three months Cuvier fell under a stroke of paralysis, and shortly died. The day before the attack he had said to Agassiz, "Be careful, and remember that work kills." We doubt if it often kills naturalists, unless when, like Cuvier, they also become statesmen. But to live and work, the naturalist must be fed.
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