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He recognized four types, which correspond exactly to Cuvier's four plans, though he calls them by different names. Let us compare them. Cuvier. Baer. Radiates, Peripheric, Mollusks, Massive, Articulates, Longitudinal, Vertebrates. Doubly Symmetrical. Though perhaps less felicitous, the names of Baer express the same ideas as those of Cuvier.
Familiar as I was with Cuvier's 'Regne Animal, I had not then seen his 'Researches on Fossil Remains, and the study of fossils seemed to me only an extension of the field of zoology. I had no idea of its direct connection with geology, or of its bearing on the problem of the successive introduction of animals on the earth.
In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash.
But till Cuvier's time there was no great principle of classification. Facts were accumulated and more or less systematized, but they were not yet arranged according to law; the principle was still wanting by which to generalize them and give meaning and vitality to the whole. It was Cuvier who found the key.
From the time when Cuvier's wonderful researches upon the extinct Mammals of the Paris gypsum first made intercalary types known, and caused them to be recognised as such, the number of such forms has steadily increased among the higher Mammalia.
Toucans Cuvier's Toucan Of this family of birds, so conspicuous from the great size and light structure of their beaks, and so characteristic of tropical American forests, five species inhabit the woods of Ega. The commonest is Cuvier's Toucan, a large bird, distinguished from its nearest relatives by the feathers at the bottom of the back being of a saffron hue instead of red.
Thus it was that Cuvier came forward with a brand-new classification of the animal kingdom, establishing four great types of being, which he called vertebrates, mollusks, articulates, and radiates. Lamarck had shortly before established the broad distinction between animals with and those without a backbone; Cuvier's Classification divided the latter the invertebrates into three minor groups.
And Buckland, Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone even beyond the master, naming the work in which he described the Kirkdale fossils, Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge.
Having shown how the fabulous monsters of ancient times and of foreign nations, such as the Chinese, were simply products of the imagination, having no prototypes in nature, Cuvier takes up the consideration of the difficulty of distinguishing the fossil bones of quadrupeds. We shall have occasion to revert to this part of Cuvier's paper in another connection.
Is it not curious that, just when you wrote to us, all full of Mrs. Strickland at Edgeworthstown, we should have been going about everywhere with Mr. Strickland at Paris? I read to him what you said about his little girl and Foster as he was going with us to a breakfast at Cuvier's, and he was delighted even to tears.
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