Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) made his name in 1796 in a famous lecture to the prestigious Institut de France on fossil bones.85 In this lecture, he essentially established that the Siberian mammoth and American mastodon (also called a “mammoth” at the time) were neither of the same species as each other nor as modern elephants, and were in fact extinct.86 In so doing, Cuvier proved that extinction was irrefutably real and set the project of inquiry for paleontology for the next twenty years.87 Throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, Cuvier continued to expand his scientific prestige, garnering national and
international respect in his position at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, “the world’s most prominent institution for research in all the sciences—animal, vegetable, and mineral—that were grouped together as natural history,” as he “established a reputation as a patient observer who stuck to the facts.”88
He was widely known as “the legislator or arbiter of natural history,” acknowledgement of his status as “the greatest naturalist of the age” granted
83 Aaron 17; O’Dea, 302; Stafford, 224; Strang, 410; Sunstein 270. 84 Schierenbeck, par. 18.
85 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 102. 86 Appel, 43.
87 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 101.
37
even by scientists who disagreed with him professionally.89 His influence on popular and professional understandings of natural history was felt not only in France, but also in Europe and the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century.90
Throughout his professional life, Cuvier proposed a number of different tenets
underlying paleontological inquiry, largely through his work with fossils. In so doing, he laid the foundation for later evolutionary work in France and abroad (including for Charles Darwin in England) in a number of important ways, despite not believing in evolution or “transformism” himself. He developed a comparative method of examining fossils that helped him resolve debates about fossil identities, and his fame—including an overstated popular legend (that he in fact encouraged) that he could reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone fragment—cemented his authority.91 Cuvier’s fossil research was based on the idea that the different parts of an animal are perfectly correlated and not just “a jumble of [independent] characteristics,” as previous taxonomists had treated them.92 An herbivore, for example, will have teeth designed for grinding; it won’t have teeth designed for puncturing prey or claws for catching or holding prey, which are unnecessary for its lifestyle.93 Thus, organisms are fitted to their conditions of existence, or ecological niches, “to assure internal harmony as well as harmony with its environment.”94
Because of this correlation of parts and
89 Appel, 40. 90 Appel, 40.
91 Appel, 43; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 381. 92 Sapp, 12.
93 Appel further notes that Cuvier’s focus on functional integrity was shared by British natural historians,
despite his avoidance of some of the buzzwords of the more religiously influenced British science, including “natural theology,” “design,” and “contrivance” (46).
94 Appel, 46. Gould observes that this “notion of adaptation” was taken up by Charles Darwin “as a centerpiece
38
fittedness to conditions of existence, Cuvier believed, evolution cannot happen because the entire animal cannot evolve at once, and changing select parts of the body would throw off the correlation and make the animal unfit.95 This, of course, we now know to be untrue, but it was consistent with Cuvier’s findings of a lack of intermediate fossil forms.
Cuvier’s Recherches and Discours
In 1812, Cuvier gathered together his previously published paleontological articles and sketches of fossils to reissue them in Recherches sur les ossemens fossils des
quadrupèdes (or Researches on Quadruped Fossil Bones, hereafter Recherches).96 This four- volume work was intended to be an accessible and organized presentation of Cuvier’s body of work and has widely been regarded as Cuvier’s professional memoir.97
Recherches marks a milestone in Western science because it popularly “established the fact of extinction and the utility of fossils in providing a framework for geological time.”98
Perhaps the most important part of Recherches, however, was its stand-alone introduction, the Discours préliminaire (or Preliminary Discourse, hereafter Discours).99 The Discours was initially published along with the first volume of Recherches, but soon was printed separately, as it did not directly review or comment on the material included in the four volumes of
95 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 104. Gould notes, “Cuvier was correct in his assertion about the impossibility
of such concerted change, but wrong in his assumption that ‘correlation of parts’—his term for the concept—is so tight. In fact, parts can be dissociated and evolve at different rates—a phenomenon called ‘mosaic evolution’” (x).
96 Reiss, 90.
97 Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 502-3; Appel, 43; Coleman, 12. 98 Gould, viii.
99 This work has been described by historians of science as “famous and widely read,” “Cuvier’s most popular
writing,” “concise and eloquent,” and “triumphantly successful in crossing the boundary…between ‘real science’ and works of popularization” (Appel, 43; Coleman, 12; Coleman, 114; Outram, 142).
39
Recherches.100 The popularity of the Discours among professional and lay populations alike led to six French editions between 1812 and Cuvier’s death in 1832, and to prompt
translations into all major European languages.101 The Discours was written as “a long essay pitched at the general educated public” that appealed “to readers with a general interest in the natural world and its significance for human life.”102
It was a venue for Cuvier to present his interpretations of his own work, and represented his only attempt to write generally about the debates his theories raised.103 The Discours, in particular, popularized Cuvier’s idea that extinctions are caused by geological or natural revolutions and that the most recent
revolution was a widespread flood; this theory became widely known as catastrophism. For much of the rest of the nineteenth century, natural historians in Europe and America as well as thinkers invested in the implications of his research had to contend in some way with the prestige of this work.104
In 1813, the most historically significant translation of Cuvier’s work was completed by a joint effort of Robert Kerr and Robert Jameson in Scotland; from the date of its
publication until 1830, this translation remained “the most influential popular geology in Britain.”105
Kerr is generally credited with the translation of the body of Cuvier’s Discours, which was criticized from its first appearance in Britain as inaccurate, a charge that historians
100 Coleman, 12. Coleman notes that the Discours fails to reflect on the material of the four volumes that
followed because he “assumed that the serious reader would refer to the special articles themselves” (126).
101 Outram, 142. Rudwick notes that the Discours’s popularity was due in large part to its being “far more
eloquent and readable than the published work of his colleagues” (Rudwick, Worlds before Adam,16).
102 Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 504, 505. 103 Reiss, 90; Outram 142.
104 “They might try to extend and confirm his inferences or use new evidence to try to refute them, but in either
case Cuvier could not be ignored” (Rudwick, Worlds before Adam,16).
40
continue to levy at the 1813 translation today.106 Kerr died as the translation was being completed, however, after which point Jameson took complete control of the work. Jameson studied geology and mineralogy in Germany with Abraham Gottlob Werner before returning to Edinburgh, where he became the chair of natural history at the University. Jameson, like his mentor Werner, adopted a Neptunist position in the geological debates raging at the time, especially in Scotland.107 James Hutton was the most prominent proponent of the opposing position, Plutonism, which argued that volcanoes were the primary geological forces responsible for shaping the earth’s surface;108
his Theory of the Earth (1788) was still being widely discussed in the early nineteenth century.109 Neptunists, on the other hand, argued that waters, particularly oceans, were the primary geological force.110 Jameson was drawn to Cuvier’s ideas because his portrayal of the most recent revolution as a major flood could bring his significant intellectual prestige to the Neptunist theory, if only the ideas were translated into that context. To accomplish this goal, Jameson appended a preface and a number of editorial notes that doubled or tripled the length of the Discours, which he
published as a volume independent from the rest of Recherches entitled Essay on the Theory
106 Seccombe, ONDB; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 510, 597. 107 Dean, ONDB.
108 Coleman, 111.
109 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 119; Jones, ONDB; Dean, ONDB. 110 Coleman, 111.
41
of the Earth.111 The new (and inaccurate) title clearly placed Cuvier’s translation in conversation with Hutton’s famous text.112
Jameson and Kerr highlighted elements of Cuvier’s theory that were consistent with the theological debates occurring in British geology at the time but that were generally of little concern to Cuvier or continental scientists.113 British reception of the work was
“particularly enthusiastic,” especially among those thinkers who “were eager to find support for the authority of religion—and hence also support for the social order—from the authority of science.”114
Jameson’s notes also made explicit the link between the most recent
geological revolution and the Biblical Flood, thus enlisting Cuvier’s “scientific evidence of the highest respectability” to support the historicity of Christian “traditional biblical
interpretation” and Neptunist claims.115
But Cuvier, like most French natural historians, “rarely mentioned God or Providence in his work, nor did he attempt to correlate Genesis with the evidence of geology”—natural theology, or the attempt to find evidence for religious claims in nature, was a specifically British phenomenon.116 Cuvier was nominally a
Protestant, which might have facilitated British science’s adoption of his ideas,117
but, as Rudwick has noted, “he was also a child of the Enlightenment, and he considered that
111 Outram, 142. Cuvier himself called the separately published work Discours sur les revolutions de la surface
du globe, or Discourse on the Revolutions at the Earth’s Surface (Coleman, 12; Rudwick, Worlds before Adam,22).
112 Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 510-11.
113 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 133-34. Furthermore, Jameson downplayed the originality of Cuvier’s work,
presenting it as part of the Wernerian tradition of geological inquiry (Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 510).
114 Outram, 142; Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 134-35.
115 Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, 133; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 596. 116 Appel, 56.
42
science and religion should not interfere in each other’s affairs, but should, for the good of both, be kept apart.”118
Cuvier did draw upon Hebrew accounts as evidence of “a major catastrophic event early in human history. But…the Genesis story featured as just one of many ancient multicultural records of the same kind, all equally garbled and unreliable unless treated with rigorous caution.”119
These nuances were undermined by Jameson’s edition of Cuvier’s work. Jameson and Kerr’s misrepresentations of Cuvier’s project inevitably influenced how his work was understood in Britain and other Anglophone countries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.120