CUVIER, GEORGES (b. Montbéliard, Württemberg, 23 August 1769; d. Paris, France, 13 May 1832), zoology, paleontology, history of science.

    network” in which the species depended on each other. At first he believed that this network had remained fixed since the six days of Creation, just as the species themselves had remained fixed. But his own paleontological discoveries forced him, as early as 1812, to admit that creation had taken place in several stages. Reptiles, he said, were found on land long before mammals; the species that had become extinct were the first to have appeared; and it is only on the most recent portions of earth that fauna was almost identical to that found there today. Primates, the last beings created, would never have existed in the fossil state, he asserts.

In 1812 Cuvier had brought together his first memoirs on paleontology in his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles des quadrupèdes. The Discours préliminaire to the work, printed separately under the title Discours sur les révolutions du globe, was in the style of Buffon's Époques de la nature, but written less in a philosophical spirit than as a defense of biblical chronology. This essay, often reprinted and translated into many languages, drew its inspiration from the geological concepts of Alexandre Brongniart.

In 1804, wanting to place the Montmartre bed of fossil formations in time, Cuvier, with Brongniart, began research that led to Géographie minéralogique des environs de Paris (1808, 1811), which was rewritten and greatly expanded as Description géologique des environs de Paris (1822, 1835). In this work, a land-mark in the history of geology, Cuvier played the lesser role. Brongniart did the necessary field work, drawing his inspiration from the works of Buffon, Soulavie, Ramond, Palassou, and especially Lamarck; the latter had described the fossil invertebrates of the Paris region and, in his Hydrogéologie (1802), had set forth the bases of the theory of “current causes,” later developed by Constant Prévost. Cuvier, respecting the short chronology of the Bible, was forced to assume, in addition to “current causes,” which act very slowly, rapid catastrophes and global upheavals which had no basis in fact.

Since he considered the theory of the variability of species to be contrary to moral law, to the Bible, and to the progress of natural science itself, Cuvier undertook a battle, which is still famous, against the ideas of his former friends Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—a battle that was often fought in secret and in which he tested his own political power. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and probably Lamarck, became the object of investigation at a time when religious beliefs were obligatory for all civil servants. In 1792 Cuvier, as we have seen, first disputed and then accepted the theory of the chain of being. Starting in 1802-1804, it appears, he once again rejected this theory for scientific, political, and religious reasons.

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had brought back from the Egyptian expedition some 3,000-year-old mummified animals that, when examined in 1802, proved to be similar to present species. For Lamarck this fact merely proved that the transformation of species is so slow as to be imperceptible over a 3,000-year period. To Cuvier such reasoning was absurd; if, over a period of 3,000 years, he said, there is zero modification, one may multiply 3,000 by zero as much as desired, and although that would increase the age of the earth, the modification of species would always remain zero. Political events reinforced Cuvier in his position; in December 1804 Napoleon had himself crowned emperor and restored the official recognition of religion to his own advantage. Thereupon Cuvier in his courses, and much to the astonishment of his audience, attacked Lamarck's materialistic ideas and passed himself off as a defender of the Bible. This return to strict religious orthodoxy was perhaps also connected with his marriage in February 1804, which seems to have reestablished his bonds with Protestant circles in Paris.

On the other hand, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire remained faithful to the ideas of his aged friend Lamarck and demonstrated that all vertebrates had the same type of body structure, which similarity constituted an argument in favor of their common origin. In 1820 he even claimed to have discovered this unity of structure in invertebrates; Cuvier criticized him with good reason; and Geoffroy, very displeased, sought revenge. In 1824 Cuvier, who worked too quickly, had classified in the crocodile group a reptile of the Jurassic period that was very far removed; Geoffroy was quick to announce the error and claimed that the reptile in question, which he called the Teleosaurus because of its anatomical peculiarities, was a predecessor of mammals of the Tertiary. He thus showed that paleontology, Cuvier's main field, could bring arguments to bear in favor of the chain of being. Geoffroy then developed that part of paleontology whose purpose was to discover the “missing links.”

Two of Geoffroy's disciples, Laurencet and Meyranx, through an audacious hypothesis that is still worthy of attention, attempted in 1829 to establish a structural analogy between fish and cephalopods, which made it possible to conceive of a transition between invertebrates and vertebrates. Cuvier sought to prevent an examination of this work by the Academy, and Geoffroy reproached him publicly; Cuvier replied angrily. From 15 February to 5 April 1830, the controversy grew progressively sharper. Cuvier accused Geoffroy and his disciples of being pantheists, a very serious accusation under the reign of Charles X. The press gave this affair extensive coverage, and