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Updated: June 11, 2025
Agassiz was such a wonderful teacher and so genial and so lovable a man that his opposition to evolution held back the advance of the Darwinian idea in America as Cuvier's influence had held back the Lamarckian idea in Europe. For the brilliant Cuvier simply laughed before his students at each "new folly" of Buffon and of Lamarck. Under this ridicule the influence of both men withered and died.
On the very morrow after their return, while they were darting to and fro close to Cuvier's window, to whose presence they had become accustomed, and which did not in the least incommode them, a screech-owl, that seemed to fall from above, pounced upon the male, seized him in his talons, and was already bearing him away, when Cuvier took down his gun, which was within reach, primed and cocked it, and fired at the owl; the fellow, mortally wounded, fell head over heels into the garden, and Cuvier hastened to deliver the swallow from the claws of the dead owl, who still held him with his formidable nails.
The grinding-teeth are in fact very similar in shape and in pattern, and in the absence of any thick layer of cement, to those of some species of Paloeotherium, especially Cuvier's Paloeotherium minus, which has been formed into a separate genus, Plagiolophus, by Pomel.
The largest of that region is Cuvier's toucan, and is distinguished from its nearest relatives by the feathers at the bottom of the back being of a saffron hue instead of red. It lays its eggs in hollows of trees, at a great height from the ground, and moults between March and June.
At length there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same animal, next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole head with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with Cuvier's vast knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the whole skeleton.
All the table cases of this gallery, with the exception of a few small side tables, are covered with the vast varieties of the of molluscous or soft animals. These shells, scattered over no less than forty-nine tables, represent the architectural capacities of the great order of soft-bodied animals, only inferior in rank, in Cuvier's "Animal Kingdom," to the Vertebrate animals.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best.
At M. Cuvier's only am I sufficiently at ease to go in a frock coat. . .Saturday, a week ago, M. de Ferussac offered me the editorship of the zoological section of the "Bulletin;" it would be worth to me an additional thousand francs, but would require two or three hours' work daily. Write me soon what you think about it.
Hilaire and De Blainville, from different points of view, contested Cuvier's hypothesis; and the discussion, which has much interest as bearing on paleontology, has been recently revived under a somewhat modified form: Professors Huxley and Owen being respectively the assailant and defender of the hypothesis.
This relation continued until Cuvier's death, and Agassiz enjoyed for several months the scientific sympathy and personal friendship of the great master whom he had honored from childhood, and whose name was ever on his lips till his own work in this world was closed. The following letter, written two months later, to his uncle in Lausanne tells the story in detail. PARIS, February 16, 1832.
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