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Updated: June 9, 2025
Although the literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge.
Although he saw that animals of successive periods displayed similar structures, like the skeleton of vertebrates, which testified to some connection, Cuvier could not bring himself to believe that this connection was a genealogical one.
Lily-pads are floating on the stream which makes the central part of the picture; large herds of the Palaeotherium, the ancient Pachyderm, reconstructed with such accuracy by Cuvier, are feeding along its banks; and a tall bird of the Heron or Pelican kind stands watching by the water's edge.
They are not mentioned by Linnæus, Cuvier, Goldsmith, or any other writer on Natural History, so far as I have been able to discover. I expect they must have come from some unexplored portion of Australia." "Never mind," I replied, "we may get more light on the subject, perhaps, before long. We will continue to label them 'California Pigeons' until we can fix their nativity elsewhere."
In the "Ossemens Fossiles" Cuvier leaves his paper just as it first appeared in the "Annales du Museum," as "a curious monument of the force of zoological laws and of the use which may be made of them." Zoological laws truly, but not physiological laws.
Indeed, as we have seen, Cuvier regarded his remains of Anchitherium as those of a species of Palæotherium. I think that this opinion was fully justifiable; but the progress of investigation has thrown an unexpected light on the question, and has brought us much nearer than could have been anticipated to a knowledge of the true series of the progenitors of the horse.
Cuvier soon showed that neither giants nor angels were in question, but elephants of an unrecognized species. Continuing his studies, particularly with material gathered from gypsum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, bones of about twenty-five species of animals that he believed to be different from any now living on the globe.
So there is in this type not only an equal division of parts on either side, but also a division above and below, making thus a double symmetry in the plan, expressed by Baer in the name he gave it. Baer was perfectly original in his conception of these four types, for his paper was published in the very same year with that of Cuvier.
The first deposits of this class, of which the characters were accurately determined, were those occurring in the neighbourhood of Paris, described in 1810 by MM. Cuvier and Brongniart. They were ascertained to consist of successive sets of strata, some of marine, others of fresh-water origin, lying one upon the other.
A curious resurrection this, by Cuvier and others, of long ages ago, to be pondered well. Not a holiday matter, to be stared at an hour's wonder and then forgotten, as of no value in the markets of the living world; but a great and a serious science, with more romances in it than shelves of novels.
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