Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
CUVIER, GEORGES (b. Montbéliard,
Württemberg,
23 August 1769; d. Paris, France, 13 May 1832),
zoology, paleontology, history of science.
retired when the future naturalist was born. Very weak
at birth, Cuvier remained in delicate health for a long
time. During his childhood he enjoyed drawing and
gave evidence of a very precocious intellectual and
emotional development. Gifted with an astonishing
memory, he mastered the entire works of Buffon. At
the age of twelve he began his natural history collections
and in the manner of an adolescent prodigy
founded a scientific society with some friends.
Montbéliard, geographically French, had been detached
from Burgundy in 1397 and rendered subject
to the duke of Württemberg; during the sixteenth
century its inhabitants adopted Luther's doctrines,
while keeping the French language. Cuvier's parents
intended for him to become a Lutheran minister like
his uncle; but his teachers preferred not to grant him
a scholarship to the school of theology at Tübingen.
Fortunately for his career, the wife of the governor
of Montbéliard recommended him to her brother-in-law,
the reigning duke, who was seeking out bright
young people to attend the Caroline University
(Hohen Karlsschule), which he had founded near
Stuttgart.
Cuvier entered that institution in 1784, at the age
of fifteen. After two years of general studies, during
which he learned German, he decided to specialize
in administrative, juridical, and economic sciences,
which included a significant portion of natural history.
As early as his second year at the university, Cuvier
had discovered near Stuttgart some plants that were
new to the region. At that time twenty-year-old Karl
Friedrich Kielmeyer was the lecturer in zoology. Exceptionally
gifted, he became one of the founders of
the German school of Naturphilosophie. It was Kielmeyer
who taught Cuvier the art of dissection and
probably comparative anatomy as well. This science
was then taught in Tübingen by J. F. Blumenbach,
whom Kielmeyer joined in 1786, after having pledged
Cuvier eternal friendship in the emotional style of late
eighteenth-century Germany.
In 1787 Cuvier received the golden cross of the
chevaliers, which allowed him to live with children
of noble birth and sometimes with the duke himself.
Thus this young man with bright blue eyes, thick red
hair, heavy features, and disheveled clothing began
his education as a select member of the court. With
a few friends he founded a natural history society that
awarded decorations to its most active members.
Cuvier completed his studies in 1788. There being no
vacant positions in the ducal government for this
penniless young commoner, he was forced to accept
a position as a private tutor in Normandy, with a
noble and affluent Protestant family named d'Héricy.
Cuvier traveled through France by stagecoach. The
luxury of Paris dazzled him. Revolutionary unrest was
beginning, but during the six years he spent in Normandy,
Cuvier led a life somewhat outside these
dramatic events. His duties as tutor were not very
engrossing. During the fall and winter he lived in
Caen, where he had rich libraries and a botanical
garden at his disposal. In the spring and summer he
accompanied the d'Héricy family to the north of
Normandy, to the château de Fiquainville, near the
sea and the fishing port of Fécamp. This gave him
the opportunity to dissect numerous marine organisms
and shorebirds. When he was in Stuttgart, Cuvier had
begun making notes almost every day and sketching
in large notebooks which he called, in the style of
Linnaeus, his Diarium zoologicum and Diarium botanicum;
in Normandy he added to them beautiful
drawings of fish and of anatomy, accompanied by
detailed descriptions.
However, Cuvier missed the Caroline University,
where he had left his closest disciple, Christian Heinrich
Pfaff. They maintained a correspondence, which
kept Cuvier in touch with his university and with the
ducal administration (which had knowledge of his
letters and the political intelligence they contained).
Since he ran the risk that letters would be opened by
the French police, Cuvier was forced to feign sympathy
to revolutionary ideas. After the Revolution,
however, he often expressed his disapproval of this
regime—in which, he said, “the populace made the
law.” He dreaded the “populace” throughout his life.
For the historian of science the Cuvier-Pfaff letters
are of double importance. They show that between
the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, Cuvier acquired
the basic ideas that he developed between 1804
and his death in 1832. These letters also allow one
to envisage an influence that Cuvier may have exerted
on Lamarck in favor of the theory of the “chain of
being.” At first Cuvier was hostile toward theories,
whether scientific, philosophical, or social. He wrote
to Pfaff in 1788: “I wish everything that experience
shows us to be carefully disassociated from hypotheses
. . . science should be based upon facts, despite systems.”
In 1791 he explained to his friend that the
structure of an animal is, of necessity, in harmony
with its mode of life.
Cuvier believed in divine providence and considered
himself to be close in spirit to Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre. Around 1791 Kielmeyer returned to the
Caroline University, and Pfaff sent Kielmeyer's unpublished
courses to Cuvier. Pfaff then recalled, in one
of his letters, Bonnet's famous theory to the effect that
all existing things from the crystal to the man form
gradually more complex systems linked through imperceptible
transitions, and thus form a continuous
