[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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    the science, M. Cuvier found two able anatomists eager and qualified to reduce, to the form of a system, the vast materials employed by him in his courses of lectures on Comparative Anatomy. M. Mertrud had been appointed to the newly created chair of Comparative Anatomy in the Garden of Plants, but from his advanced age at that time, he was induced by the advice of his colleagues to appoint Cuvier as his substitute, and in that capacity Cuvier devoted himself to the extension of the Zootomical Museum, and to the means of illustrating his lectures, which were then attended by numex*ous assemblies. On the death of Mertrud, who had been long assistant to Daubenton, Cuvier succeeded him as Professor of Comparative Anatomy on the 1st of November, 1802. M. Dumeril, who accomplished the two first volumes of the Lemons d’Anatomie Comparee, comprehending the Organs of Motion and those of Sensation, was then at the head of the anatomical department of the School of Medicine at Paris ; and the composer of the three last volumes, treating chiefly of the Organs of Digestion, Circulation, Respiration, Secretion, and Generation, was Dr. Duvernoy, a relation of M. Cuvier, a young and zealous anatomist, and now the distinguished Professor of Natural History at Strasburg. M. Cuvier’s attention was at this time directed to the excavations in the gypsum strata of Montmartre; and his frequent excursions to that interesting theatre of geological events, together with the labour of com- paring the accumulations of bones daily extracted from the quarries with those of the skeletons preserved in the cabinet, must have considerably distracted his attention from the com- pilation of the Legons d’Anatomie Comparde, and left a large share of the merit of these volumes to the skilful anatomists who conducted them. The first volume of the work is prefaced by a letter of twenty-two pages from Cuvier to his zealous preceptor. Professor Mertrud; in which he explains, with his usual eloquence and perspicuity, the nature of the subject, the particular scope of the work, and the manner in which it was got up, from his oral demonstrations. The work is in five octavo volumes, of about 500 pages each: it is illustrated by fifty-two engraved plates; and, although it is now thirty years since it was published, it still forms the most perspicuous, correct, and complete systematic view of the science which exists in any language. In collecting materials for the work, Cuvier was aided by many donations of specimens from his friends and correspondents in distant parts : he had liberty to dissect all the animals which died in the Menagerie, and even to open those rare species which had long been preserved in