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Updated: June 11, 2025
The generous review in question may be judged of by its first line and last sentence; as Hercules from his advancing foot, or Cuvier's Megatherium from the relics of its great toe.
At the present moment, it is impossible to draw up any definition, based on broad anatomical or developmental characters, by which any one of Cuvier's great groups shall be separated from all the rest. On the contrary, the lower members of each tend to converge towards the lower members of all the others. The same may be said of the vegetable world.
Cuvier's reasoning has such great historical interest being the argument of the greatest opponent of evolution of that day that we quote it at some length. "The following objections," he says, "have already been started against my conclusions.
Hence the teleological argument for Cuvier's first diagnostic character the presence in animals of an alimentary cavity, or internal pocket, in which they can carry about their nutriment has broken down, so far, at least, as his mode of stating it goes. And, with the advance of microscopic anatomy, the universality of the fact itself among animals has ceased to be predicable.
After giving Cuvier's definition of the "negro," the Senator remarked: "The great naturalist might have added as other distinctive characteristics of the negro; first, that his skin exhales perpetually a peculiar pungent and disagreeable odor; second, that 'the hollow of his foot makes a hole in the ground." The Senator drew a fearful picture of the schemes of Massachusetts to use the negro voters, whom it was her policy to create in the South.
The directors of the society placed all their treasures at his command, and he now divided his time between hard study of languages and hard labor at the forge. To show how he passed his days, I will copy an entry or two from his private diary he then kept: "Monday, June 18. Headache; 40 pages Cuvier's Theory of the Earth; 64 pages French; 11 hours forging.
Then some great upheaval of nature occurred which overwhelmed and destroyed all living creatures. The Creator then, in Cuvier's view, proceeded to construct a new series of animals and plants, which were not identical with those of the former time, but were created according to the same general working plans or architectural schemes employed before.
I refer to Cuvier's investigation of the mammalian fossils yielded by the quarries in the older tertiary rocks of Montmartre, among the chief results of which was the bringing to light of two genera of extinct hoofed quadrupeds, the Anoplotherium and the Palaeotherium.
He found the fossil shells the fossils of invertebrates, as he himself had christened them in deeper strata than Cuvier's vertebrates; and he believed that there had been long ages when no higher forms than these were in existence, and that in successive ages fishes, and then reptiles, had been the highest of animate creatures, before mammals, including man, appeared.
Many modifications of Cuvier's great divisions have been attempted. Some naturalists, for instance, have divided off a part of the Radiates and Articulates, insisting upon some special features of structure, and mistaking these for the more important and general characteristics of their respective plans.
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