[Reviews of works by George Cuvier].

Date:
[1830?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Reviews of works by George Cuvier]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    livered lectures on Comparative Anatomy, for Mertrud, in the Garden of Plants, he published his first separate work, the ‘ Tableau Elementaire,1 in 1798. This work forms an octavo volume of 710 pages, it presented a new distribution of the whole animal kingdom, and it formed the basis of the two suc- ceeding editions of the llegne Animal. The principles of classification, adopted in this early publication, had already been partly developed by him in a separate memoir on a new division of white-blooded animals, which he published at the age of twenty-six, three years before the appearance of the Tableau Elementaire. In that early memoir, which was read to the Natural History Society of Paris on the 10th of May, 1795, and printed in the Decade Philosophique, Cuvier first attacked Linnaeus’s division of the invertebrata into insects and worms, and assigned the characters and limits of the new classes mollusca, Crustacea, insecta, vermes, echinodermata and zoophyta. The distribution of these invertebrate classes into three great divisions equal to the vertebrata, was afterwards established by Cuvier in a memoir read to the Institute in July, 1812. The classification of animals is one of the principal objects to which the researches both of the zoologist and comparative anatomist are directed : without the assist- ance derived from methodical arrangement, the multitude and variety of objects belonging to the animal kingdom would continually impede our investigations, and overpower the strongest mind. The efforts of M. Cuvier were, therefore, early directed to this important point; and the publication just mentioned is an outline of the course of lectures delivered by him at the Pantheon, on this subject, in 1797- The animal kingdom is there divided into eight great classes : four of verte- brate animals, Mammalia, Aves, Reptilia, Places; and four of invertebrate animals, Mollusca, Insecta, Vermes, Zoophyta ; the orders, genera, and many of the species of which are illustrated by ample details, and the characters of all the dif- ferent groups are illustrated by fourteen plates, from his own pencil, representing more than a hundred objects. This work has not been translated into English, but a Portuguese transla- tion of it, by Almeida, was published in London in 1815, in 2 vols. 8vo. After some interesting observations on the utility of the study of Zoology, and its applications to other sciences, he details the properties which distinguish organized and sentient beings, and gives an outline of the organization of the human body and the distinctions among the different races of mankind, hi treating of the mammalia he has somewhat improved the j classification