Cuvier Sentence Examples

Supported by the great authority of Haller, the doctrine of evolution, or development, prevailed throughout the whole of the 18th century, and Cuvier appears to have substantially adopted Bonnet's later views, though probably he would not have gone all lengths in the direction of " emboitement."

Cuvier on anatomical, and Von Baer on embryological grounds, made the further step of proving that, even in this limited sense, animals cannot be arranged in a single series, but that there are several distinct plans of organization to be observed among them, no one of which, in its highest and most complicated modification, leads to any of the others.

The conclusions enunciated by Cuvier and Von Baer have been confirmed in principle by all subsequent research into the structure of animals and plants.

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.

Cuvier's term in its wide extension, however, passed into general use; but, as the anatomy of the different forms became more fully known, the difficulty of including them under the common designation made itself increasingly obvious.

This circlet of gill-lamellae led Cuvier to class the limpets as Cyclobranchiata, and, by erroneous identification of them with the series of metamerically repeated ctenidia of Chiton, to associate the latter mollusc with the former.

This fact led Cuvier erroneously to the belief that a duct existed leading from the gonad to this papilla.

It was reserved for Georges Cuvier, who in 1798 published at Paris his Tableau elementaire de l'histoire naturelle des ani-.

Confining our attention here to ornithology, Cuvier's arrangement of the class Aver is now seen to be not very much better than any which it superseded.

But this view is gained by following the methods which Cuvier taught.

It is due to Vieillot to mention these facts, as he has been accused of publishing his method in haste to anticipate some of Cuvier's views, but he might well complain of the delay in London.

The new doctrine, loudly proclaiming the discovery of a " Natural" System, led away many from the steady practice which should have followed the teaching of Cuvier (though he in ornithology had not been able to act up to the principles he had lain down) and from the extended study of Comparative Anatomy.

Tiedemann's carefully-wrought Anatomic and N aturgeschichte der V gel - which shows a remarkable advance upon the work which Cuvier did in 1805, and in some respects is superior to his later production of 1817.

Nitzsch's name was subsequently dismissed by Cuvier without a word of praise, and in terms which would have been applicable to many another and inferior author, while Temminck, terming Naumann's work an " ouvrage de luxe "-it being in truth one of the cheapest for its contents ever published-effectually shut it out from the realms of science.

The latter's name seems not to be even mentioned by him, but Nitzsch was in Paris in the summer of 1827, and it is almost impossible that he should not have heard of L'Herminier's labours, unless the relations between the followers of Cuvier to whom Nitzsch attached himself, and those of De Blainville, whose pupil L'Herminier was, were such as to forbid anv communication between the rival schools.

Yet we have L'Herminier's evidence that Cuvier gave him every assistance.

But it was now made to appear that the struthious birds in this respect resembled, not only the duck, but a great many other groups - waders, birds-of-prey, pigeons, passerines and perhaps all birds not gallinaceous - so that, according to Cuvier's view, the five points of ossification observed in the Gallinae, instead of exhibiting the normal process, exhibited one quite exceptional, and that in all other birds, so far as he had been enabled to investigate the matter, ossification of the sternum began at two points only, situated near the anterior upper margin of the side of the sternum, and gradually crept towards the keel, into which it presently extended; and, though he allowed the appearance of detached portions of calcareous matter at the base of the still cartilaginous keel in ducks at a certain age, he seemed to consider this an individual peculiarity.

Geoffroy here maintained that the five centres of ossification existed in the duck just as in the fowl, and that the real difference of the process lay in the period at which they made their appearance, a circumstance which, though virtually proved by the preparations Cuvier had used, had been by him overlooked or misinterpreted.

Nor, argued Geoffroy, was it true to say, - as Cuvier had said, that the like occurred in the pigeons and true passerines.

Cuvier seems to have acquiesced in the corrections of his views made by Geoffroy, and attempted no rejoinder; but the attentive and impartial student of the discussion will see that a good deal was really wanting to make the latter's reply effective, though, as events have shown, the former was hasty in the conclusions at which he arrived, having trusted too much to the first appearance of centres of ossification, for, had his observations in regard to other birds been carried on with the same attention to detail as in regard to the fowl, he would certainly have reached some very different results.

The points at issue between Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire before mentioned naturally attracted the attention of L'Herminier, who in 1836 presented to the French Academy the results of his researches into the mode Isidore of growth of that bone which in the adult bird he had already studied to such good purpose.

By way of examples of L'Herminier's observations, what he says of the two groups that had been the subject of Cuvier's and the elder Geoff roy's contest may be mentioned.

As regards the ducks, L'Herminier agreed with Cuvier that there are commonly only two centres of ossification - the side-pieces of the middle series; but as these grow to meet one another a distinct median " noyau," also of the same series, sometimes appears, which soon forms a connexion with each of them.

Indeed it is, as the latter says, that of Linnaeus, improved by Cuvier, with an additional modification of Illiger'sall these three authors having totally ignored any but external characters.

Scansores, being the Grimpeurs of Cuvier, the Zygodactyli of several other systematists.

Its basis is the classification of Cuvier, the modifications of which by Des Murs will seldom commend themselves to systematists whose opinion is generally deemed worth having.

This being the case, it would seem useless to take up further space by analysing the several proposed modifications of Cuvier's arrangement.

One of the genera was named Nemertes by Cuvier.

Cuvier expresses the opinion that the dog exhibits the most complete and the most useful conquest that man has made.

In the Tableau Elementaire, published in 1795, Cuvier adopts Linnaeus's term in its earlier sense, but uses the French word "Reptiles," already brought into use by Brisson, as the equivalent of Amphibia.

In addition Cuvier accepts the Linnaean subdivisions of Amphibia-Reptilia for the tortoises, lizards (including crocodiles), salamanders and frogs; and Amphibia-Serpentes for the snakes, apodal lizards and Caeciliae.

Cuvier went no further than Brongniart, and, in the Regne Animal, he dropped the term Amphibia, and substituted Reptilia for it.

Gradually since the time of Hunter and Cuvier anatomical study has associated itself with the more superficial morphography until to-day no one considers a study of animal form of any value which does not include internal structure, histology and embryology in its scope.

The commencement of anatomical investigations deserves notice here as influencing the general accuracy and minuteness with which zoological work was prosecuted, but it was not until a late date that their full influence was brought to bear upon systematic zoology by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832).

Between Linnaeus and Cuvier there are no very great names; but under the stimulus given by the admirable method and system of Linnaeus observation and description of new forms from all parts of the world, both recent and fossil, accumulated.

We can only cite the Cuvier.

We have mentioned Lamarck before his great contemporary Cuvier because, in spite of his valuable philosophical doctrine of development, he was, as compared with Cuvier and estimated as a systematic zoologist, a mere enlargement and logical outcome of Linnaeus.

Cuvier (1769-1832) is that he started a new view as to the relationship of animals, which he may be said in a large measure to have demon strated as true by his own anatomical researches.

Apart from this, Cuvier was a keen-sighted and enthusiastic anatomist of great skill and industry.

Cuvier dissected many Molluscs and other animals which had not previously been anatomized; of others he gave more correct accounts than had been given by earlier writers.

Another special distinction of Cuvier is his remarkable work in comparing extinct with recent organisms, his descriptions of the fossil Mammalia of the Paris basin, and his general application of the knowledge of recent animals to the reconstruction of extinct ones, as indicated by fragments only of their skeletons.

It was in 1812 that Cuvier communicated to the Academy of Sciences of Paris his views on the classification of animals.

Cuvier's His classification as finally elaborated in Le Regne classifi- cation.

The leading idea of Cuvier, his four embranchemens, was confirmed by the Russo-German naturalist Von Baer (1792-1876), who adopted Cuvier's divisions, speaking of them as the peripheric, the longitudinal, the massive, and the vertebrate types of structure.

Cuvier may be regarded as the zoologist by whom anatomy was made the one important guide to the understanding of the relations of animals.

The more cautious Cuvier adopted a view of the relationships of animals which, whilst denying genetic connexion as the explanation, recognized an essential identity of structure throughout whole groups of animals.

Cuvier's doctrine of four plans of structure was essentially a morphological one, and so was the single-scale doctrine of Buffon and Lamarck, to which it was opposed.

Cuvier's morphological doctikne received its fullest development in the principle of the " correlation of parts," which he applied to palaeontological investigation, namely, that every animal is a definite whole, and that no part can be varied without entailing correlated and law-abiding variations in other parts, so that from a fragment it should be possible, had we a full knowledge of the laws of animal structure or morphology, to reconstruct the whole.

Here Cuvier was imperfectly formulating, without recognizing the real physical basis of the phenomena, the results of the laws of heredity, which were subsequently investigated and brought to bear on the problems of animal structure by Darwin.

Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) may be regarded as the foremost of Cuvier's disciples.

The classification adopted by Owen in his lectures (1855) does not adequately illustrate the progress of zoological classifi- knowledge between Cuvier's death and that date, but, such as it is, it is worth citing here.

The real centre of progress of systematic zoology was no longer in France nor with the disciples of Cuvier in England, but after his death moved to Germany.

His true greatness can only be estimated by a consideration of the fact that he was a great teacher not only of human and comparative anatomy and zoology but also of physiology, and that nearly all the most distinguished German zoologists and physiologists of the period 1850 to 1870 were his pupils and acknowledged his leadership. The most striking feature about Johann Miller's work, apart from the comprehensiveness of his point of view, in which he added to the anatomical and morphological ideas of Cuvier a consideration of physiology, embryology and microscopic structure, was the extraordinary accuracy, facility and completeness of his recorded observations.

A name which is apt to be forgotten in the period between Cuvier and Darwin, because its possessor occupied an isolated position in England and was not borne up by any j.

He upset (1830) Cuvier's retention of the Cirripedes among Mollusca, and his subsequent treatment of them as an isolated class, by showing that they begin life as free-swimming Crustacea identical with the young forms of other Crustacea.

Kolliker (Development of Cephalopods, 1844), Remak (Development of the Frog, 1850), and others had laid the foundations of this knowledge in isolated examples; but it was Kovalevsky, by his accounts of the development of Ascidians and of Amphioxus (1866), who really made zoologists see that a strict and complete cellular embryology of animals was as necessary and feasible a factor in the comprehension of their relationships as at the beginning of the century the coarse anatomy had been shown to be by Cuvier.

Lamarck believed in a single progressive series of forms, whilst Cuvier introduced s the conception of branches.

In 1822 he was made perpetual secretary in conjunction with Cuvier, in succession to Delambre.

Among the social clubs of the city are the Queen City Club, organized in 1874; the Phoenix Club, organized in 1856 and the leading Jewish club in the city; the Cuvier Club, organized in 1871 and originally an association of hunters and anglers for the preservation of game and fish; the Cincinnati Club, the Business Men's Club, the University Club, the Art Club, and the Literary Club, of the last of which many prominent men, including President Hayes, have been members.

Progress in these two lines is by no means uniform; while, for example, palaeontology enjoyed a sudden advance early in the 19th century through the discoveries and researches of Cuvier, guided by his genius as a comparative anatomist, it was checked by his failure as a natural philosopher.

In future the philosophic method of palaeontology must continue to advance step by step with exploration; it would be a reproach to later generations if they did not progress as far beyond the philosophic status of Cuvier, Owen and even of Huxley and Cope, as the new materials represent an advance upon the material opportunities which came to them through exploration.

Palaeontology connected with comparative anatomy by Cuvier.

Political troubles and the dominating influence of Werner's speculations checked palaeontology in Germany, while under the leadership of Lamarck and Cuvier France came to the fore.

It is most interesting to note that William Smith (1769-1839), now known as the " father of historical geology," was born in the same year as Cuvier.

Cuvier (1769-1832) is famous as the founder of vertebrate palaeontology, and with Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) as the author of the first exact contribution to stratigraphic geology.

In Cuvier's defence Charles Deperet maintains that the extreme theory of successive extinctions followed by a succession of creations is attributable to Cuvier's followers rather than to the master himself.

Deperet points also that we owe to Cuvier the first clear expression of the idea of the increasing organic perfection of all forms of life from the lower to the higher horizons, and that, while he believed that extinctions were due to sudden revolutions on the surface of the earth, he also set forth the pregnant ideas that the renewals of animal life were by migration from other regions unknown, and that these migrations were favoured by alternate elevations and depressions which formed various land routes between great continents and islands.

Thus Cuvier, following Buffon, clearly anticipated the modern doctrine of faunal migrations.

The chief contributions of Cuvier's great philosophical opponent, Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772-1844), are to be found in his maintenance with Lamarck of the doctrine of the mutability of species.

It was Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny (1802-1857) who pushed to an extreme Cuvier's ideas of the fixity of species and of successive extinctions, and finally developed the wild hypothesis of twenty-seven distinct creations.

While these views were current in France, exaggerating and surpassing the thought of Cuvier, they were strongly opposed in Germany by such authors as Ernst Friedrich von Schlotheim (1764-1832) and Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800-1862); and the latter demonstrated that certain species actually pass from one formation to another.

Following Cuvier's Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, the rich succession of Tertiary mammalian life was gradually revealed to France through the explorations and descriptions of such authors as Croizet, Jobert, de Christol, Eymar, Pomel and Lartet, during a period of rather dry, systematic work, which included, however, the broader generalizations of Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1778-1850), and culminated in the comprehensive treatises on Tertiary palaeontology of Paul Gervais (1816-1879).

In philosophy Agassiz was distinctly a disciple of Cuvier and supporter of the doctrine of special creation, and to a more limited extent of cataclysmic extinctions.

The reptiles awaited a great classifier, and such a one appeared in England in the person of Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), the direct successor of Cuvier and a comparative anatomist of the first rank.

Leidy adhered strictly to Cuvier's exact descriptive methods, and while an evolutionist and recognizing clearly the genetic relationships of the horses and other groups, he never indulged in speculation.

Lyell marshalled all the observations he could collect in support of this principle, teaching that the present is the key to the past, and arraying all obtainable evidence against the cataclysmic theories of Cuvier.

The theory of past migrations from continent to continent, suggested by Cuvier to explain the replacement of the animal life which had become extinct through sudden geologic changes, was prophetic of one of the chief features of modern method - namely, the tracing of migrations.

The consequences of this principle when applied to the adaptations of animals bring us to the very antithesis of Cuvier's supposed "law of correlation," for we find that, while the end results of adaptation are such that all parts of an animal conspire to make the whole adaptive, there is no fixed correlation either in the form or rate of development of parts, and that it is therefore impossible for the palaeontologist to predict the anatomy of an unknown animal from one of its parts only, unless the animal happens to belong to a type generally familiar.

It was early perceived by Huxley, Cope and many others that Cuvier's broad belief in a universal progression was erroneous, and there developed the distinction between " persistent primitive types " (Huxley) and " progressive types."

Baron Cuvier in his Eloge historique of Fourcroy repels the charge, but he can scarcely be acquitted of time-serving indifference, if indeed active, though secret, participation be not proved against him.

The definite erection of the Mollusca into the position of one of the great primary groups of the animal kingdom is due to George Cuvier (1788-1800), who largely occupied himself with the dissection of representatives of this type.

The main limitations of the sub-kingdom or phylum Mollusca, as laid down by Cuvier, and the chief divisions thus recognized within its limits by him, hold good to the present day.

The first of Cuvier's classes to be removed from the Mollusca was that of the Cirrhopoda.

The next class to be removed from Cuvier's * These figures refer to the Bibliography at the end of the article.

Henri Milne-Edwards in 1844 demonstrated the affinities of the Polyzoa with the Molluscan class Brachiopoda, and proposed to associate the three classes Brachiopoda, Polyzoa and Tunicata in a large group " Molluscoidea," co-ordinate with the remaining classes of Cuvier's Mollusca, which formed a group retaining the name Mollusca.

The story told to Herodotus of its destroying snakes is, according to Savigny, devoid of truth, but Cuvier states that he discovered partly digested remains of a snake in the stomach of a mummied ibis.

Originally the Chitons were placed with the limpets, Patella, in Cuvier's Cyclobranchia, an order of the Gastropoda.

Cuvier proclaimed their fixity without reserve.

In the first volume a chapter "De plantis in genere" contains an account of all the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time regarding plants, with the recent speculations and discoveries of Caesalpinus, Grew, Malpighi and Jung; and Cuvier and Dupetit Thouars, declaring that it was this chapter which gave acceptance and authority to these authors' works, say that "the best monument that could be erected to the memory of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work separately."

For accounts of Ray's system of classification, see Cuvier, Lecons hist.

Brongniart was also the coadjutor of Cuvier in the admirable Essai sur la geographie mineralogique des environs de Paris (Paris, 1811); originally published in Ann.

It required the extraordinary acumen of the great Cuvier at once to recognize, when the first specimens of the Gyrinus edulis.

And yet subsequent discoveries, which followed in rapid succession, have established that Siredon is but the larval form of the salamander Amblystoma, a genus long known from various parts of North America; and Cuvier's conclusions now read much better than they did half a century after they were published.

In 1830, at the suggestion of Baron Georges de Cuvier, then minister of Protestant worship, Coquerel was called to Paris as pastor of the Reformed Church.

The then recent work of Cuvier on fossil mammalia encouraged Lartet in excavations which led in 1834 to his first discovery of fossil remains in the neighbourhood of Auch.

Aided by a public stipendium, he spent a year or more studying in the Jardin des Plantes, under the friendly eye of Cuvier, and in making zoological discoveries at Cagliari and other places on the Mediterranean.

Leopards and bears are numerous; and the sand-badger, the Arctonyx collaris of Cuvier, a small animal somewhat resembling a bear, but having the snout, eyes and tail of a hog, is found.

The term was popularized by Cuvier, and the majority of writers followed him in its adoption.

About 1796 he went to Paris to study painting, but he ultimately devoted himself to natural history, and attracted the attention of Baron Cuvier, for whom he occasionally lectured at the College de France and at the Athenaeum.

In 1812 he was aided by Cuvier to obtain the chair of anatomy and zoology in the Faculty of Sciences at Paris, but subsequently an estrangement grew up between the two men and ended in open enmity.

Two years later, on the death of Cuvier, he obtained the chair of comparative anatomy, which he continued to occupy for the space of eighteen years, proving himself no unworthy successor to his great teacher.

It was originally described by Collini in 1784 as an unknown sea-animal, and its true nature was first determined by Cuvier in 1809, when he named it "Pterodactyle."

Linnaeus's primarily zoological classification of man did not, however, suit the philosophical opinion of the time, which responded more readily to the systems represented by Buffon, and later by Cuvier, in which the human mind and soul formed an impassable wall of partition between him and other mammalia, so that the definition of man's position in the animal world was treated as not belonging to zoology, but to metaphysics and theology.

Pasquier, Beugnot, de Barante, Cuvier, Mounier, Guizot and Decazes had been imperial officials.

This primary group was set up to indicate the residuum of Cuvier's Articulata when his class Annelides (the modern Chaetopoda) was removed from that embranchement.

We have, in fact, returned very nearly to Cuvier's conception of a great division or branch, which he called Articulata, including the Arthropoda and the Chaetopoda (Annelides of Lamarck, a name adopted by Cuvier), and differing from it only by the inclusion of the Rotif era.

The name Articulata, introduced by Cuvier, has not been retained by subsequent writers.

As shown by Burmeister in his historical review (1834), these animals, comprised by Linnaeus in the genus Lepas, first received a more comprehensive title from Cuvier, who called them Cirrhopoda, a word strictly meaning tawnyfooted.

Hoek, however, observes that the interpretation of the glands as salivary is not given by Krohn as his own opinion, but only quoted from Cuvier.

George Cuvier, the French anatomist, recognized that the skull came from a giant marine lizard.

The original Dutch skull (Mosasaurus hoffmanni ), figured by Cuvier, was mostly disarticulated.

The school of Cuvier was lamentably deficient in embryologists; and it was only in the course of the first thirty years of the igth century that Prevost and Dumas in France, and, later on, Ddllinger, Pander, von Bar, Rathke, and Remak in Germany, founded modern embryology; and, at the same time, proved the utter incompatibility of the hypothesis of evolution as formulated by Bonnet and Haller with easily demonstrable facts.

The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe were held to be models of sound scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and philosophical hypotheses of the Hydrogeologie were scouted.

By this time he had visited several of the principal museums on the Continent, among others Leyden (where Temminck resided) and Paris (where he had frequent intercourse with Cuvier), thus becoming acquainted with a considerable number of exotic forms that had hitherto been inaccessible to him.

Cuvier gives an interesting account of a young wolf which, having been trained to follow his master, showed affection and submission scarcely inferior to the domesticated dog.

The science of geology came into existence, and the whole panorama of successive stages of the earth's history, each with its distinct population of strange animals and plants, unlike those of the present day and simpler in proportion as they recede into the past, was revealed by Cuvier, Agassiz and others.

The new movement began actively ology of with James Hutton in the later years of the 18th century, and was forwarded by the studies of William Smith in England and of Cuvier in France; but the really efficient champion of the conception that the earth is very old was Sir Charles Lyell, who published the first edition of his epoch-making Principles of Geology only a few years before Queen Victoria came to the throne.

As a natural philosopher he radically opposed Cuvier and was distinctly a precursor of uniformitarianism, advocating the hypothesis of slow changes and variations, both in living forms and in their environment.

As Cuvier founded the palaeontology of mammals and reptiles, so Louis Agassiz's epoch-making works Recherches sur les poissons fossiles (1833-1845) laid the secure foundations of palaeichthyology, and were followed by Christian Heinrich Pander's (1794-1865) classic memoirs on the fossil fishes of Russia.

Again, directly opposed to Cuvier's principle, we have discovered carnivores with hoofs, such as Mesonyx, and herbivores with sloth-like claws, such as Chalicotherium.

This latter animal is closely related to one which Cuvier termed Pangolin gigantesque, and had he restored it according to his " law of correlation " he would have pictured a giant " scaly anteater," a type as wide as the poles from the actual form of Chalicotherium, which in body, limbs and teeth is a modified ungulate herbivore, related remotely to the tapirs.

It required the extraordinary acumen of the great Cuvier at once to recognize, when the first specimens of the Gyrinus edulis .

Stannius renovated the group Vermes of Linnaeus, and placed in it the Chaetopods and the parasitic worms of Cuvier, besides the Rotifers and Turbellarian worms.1 The result of the knowledge gained in the last quarter of the 19th century has been to discredit altogether the group Vermes (see Worm), thus set up and so largely accepted by German writers even at the present day.