George Leopold Christian Frederic Dagobert Cuvier was born August 23, 1769, at Montbeliard, a small town in Alsace, which then formed part of the territory of the Duke of Wurtemburg. His father was a retired officer, living upon his pension, who had formerly held a commission in a Swiss regiment in the service of France. He had the inestimable advantage of possessing a very sensible mother who even in infancy attended with sedulous care to the formation of his character, and the development of his mind. He gave early indications that nature had endowed him with her choicest intellectual gifts. A memory of extraordinary strength, joined to industry, and to the power of fixing his attention steadily upon whatever he was engaged in, enabled him to master all the ordinary studies of youth with facility; and by the time he was fourteen years of age he had acquired a fair knowledge of the ancient, and of several modern languages, and had made considerable progress in the mathematics, besides having stored his mind by a wide range of historical reading. He very early gave proofs of a talent for drawing, which in after-life proved of material service in his researches into natural history. When he was twelve years old he read the works of Buffon with avidity, and he no doubt received from the writings of that accomplished and elegant historian of nature an early bias towards the study of zoology. While he was at school he instituted a little academy of sciences among his companions, of which he was elected the president: his sleeping-room was their hall of meeting, and the bottom of his bed the president’s chair. They read extracts from books of history, travels, and natural philosophy, which they discussed; and the debate was usually followed by an opinion on the merits of the question, pronounced from the chair.

In 1783 the reigning Duke of Wurtemburg visited Montbeliard; and became acquainted with the unusual attainments of young Cuvier, who had then reached the fourteenth year of his age. Struck by the early promise of future eminence, he offered to take him under his own protection. The proposal was readily accepted, and the future philosopher went to Stutgard to prosecute his studies in the university of that place. He continued there four years, and did not fail to turn to good account the excellent opportunities which were afforded to him, of laying the foundation of that extensive acquaintance with every great department of human knowledge, for which he was in after-life so eminently distinguished. The universality of his genius was as remarkable as the depth and accuracy of his learning in that particular field of science, with which his name is more especially associated. He not only gained the highest academical prizes, but was decorated by the Duke with an order; a distinction which was only conferred upon five or six out of the four hundred students at the university.

He had now arrived at an age when it was necessary for him to choose a profession, and his inclination led him to seek employment in one of the public offices in the country of his patron. This he would probably have obtained; but, happily for science, the circumstances of his parents made it impossible for him to linger in expectation, and he changed his views. In July, 1788, being then in his nineteenth year, he accepted the office of tutor in a Protestant family in Normandy, having been himself brought up in that faith.

The family lived in a very retired situation near the sea; and Cuvier was not so constantly engaged with his pupils as to prevent him from cultivating those branches of science, for which he had imbibed a decided taste while listening to the lectures of Abel, the professor of natural history at Stutgard. He devoted himself especially to the study of the Mollusca, for which his vicinity to the sea afforded him good opportunities; and continued his researches uninterruptedly for six years in this retirement. The reign of terror at Paris, which spared neither virtue nor talent, drove M. Tessier, a member of the Academy of Sciences, to seek refuge in Normandy. He became acquainted with the young naturalist, and soon learned to appreciate his talents; and he introduced him to the correspondence of several of the more eminent men of science in Paris, among whom were Lametheric, Olivier, and LacepÈde. The impression which Cuvier made upon his correspondents was so great, that when tranquillity was restored, they invited him to come to the capital. He accepted the invitation, and in the spring of 1795 removed to Paris. He was soon afterwards appointed Professor of Natural History in the central school of the Pantheon.

Being very desirous of obtaining some official connexion with the Museum of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, with the view of gaining free access to the valuable collections there deposited, he solicited the aid of his scientific friends, and by their exertions, particularly those of De Jussieu, Geoffroy, and LacepÈde, he was nominated assistant to Mertrud, the professor of comparative anatomy, a chair which had been recently instituted. Here he had free scope to indulge his passion for that branch of science, and by his indefatigable exertions he speedily brought together a very copious supply of illustrations for his lectures. He never ceased to make the museum a primary object of his care, and at last formed the most perfect and the most splendid collection of comparative anatomy which exists in the world. The excellence of his lectures, in which the interest of the subject was heightened by his eloquence and easy delivery, attracted a crowd of auditors; and while he thus excited and extended a taste for a department of science previously but little cultivated, those who listened to him spread the fame of the young professor.

At the establishment of the Institute in 1796 he was chosen one of the original members; and the papers which he read before that body, giving an account of his researches and discoveries in comparative anatomy, enriched their memoirs, and procured for him a high and widely extended reputation at an early period of life. In 1800 he was appointed Secretary to the Institute. In the same year Bonaparte was appointed President. Cuvier thus, by virtue of his office, was brought into immediate and frequent communication with that extraordinary man; an event which had a material influence upon his future destiny, and opened to him new and wide fields of usefulness and distinction. Such were the powers of his mind, and so great was the versatility of his genius, that in whatever situation he was placed his superiority was soon acknowledged by his associates.

In the year 1802 the attention of the First Consul was directed to the subject of public instruction, and six inspectors-general were commissioned to organize lyceums or colleges in thirty towns of France. Cuvier was one of them, and he left Paris to execute the duties which had been assigned to him in the provinces. From this period his attention was always particularly directed to the subject of education; and his labours in that cause have had the most important influence upon every institution for public instruction in France, from the University of Paris down to the most humble village school. At the foundation of the Imperial University in 1808, Cuvier was named a member of its council for life. When Italy was annexed to the French empire, he was charged at three different times with missions to that country, for the purpose of re-organizing the old academies and colleges, and of establishing new ones: and in the last of those missions in 1813, although a Protestant, he was sent to form the University at Rome. In 1811 he went into Belgium and Holland to perform the same duties; and the reports which he drew up on that occasion, which were afterwards printed, possess great interest, especially in those parts where he speaks of the schools in Holland for the lower classes. He felt how important it is to the welfare of a nation, that good education should be within reach even of the poor: and there is no country in Europe where that subject is attended to with more enlightened views than in Holland, where excellent primary schools have been in operation for nearly half a century. When the great measure for the general introduction of schools for the lower orders throughout France, was brought forward in 1821, the duty of drawing up the plan upon which they were to be established was confided to Cuvier; and his enlightened benevolence and practical good sense are equally conspicuous in the system which on his recommendation was adopted. It has proved admirably adapted to the ends in view. The direction of the Protestant schools was more particularly intrusted to him, and he introduced into all those which had previously existed many important improvements.

In February, 1815, the university was remodelled by the Bourbon government, and Cuvier was appointed a member of the Royal Council of Public Instruction. Shortly afterwards came the events of the Hundred Days, and among them the restoration of the Imperial University. Cuvier was re-appointed to his seat in the Council, for they felt that they could not do there without him. In four months another revolution took place in the university, as in other public establishments; and as it was found that the system of the Royal University could not be resumed, a commission was appointed to execute the functions of the Grand Master, the Chancellor, and the Treasurer. In this commission the duties which had belonged to the Chancellor were assigned to Cuvier. In this station he was eminently useful in maintaining the rights of the university under circumstances of no ordinary difficulty. He was twice President of the Commission, and each time for a year; but on account of his being a Protestant he could not retain that place permanently. But the Bishop, who, as a member of the commission, had discharged the duties which belonged to the Grand Master of the University, was appointed minister for ecclesiastical affairs; and Cuvier was nominated as his successor, so far as concerned the Protestant faculty of theology, and continued to act in this capacity for the rest of his life. As a member of the Council of State, and attached to the department of the Minister of the Interior, he had the direction of all matters relating to Protestant, and other religious congregations, not Catholic.

During his mission to Rome in 1813 he was appointed by Napoleon a member of the Council of State; and on the restoration of the Bourbons his political opinions formed no obstacle to his continuing in that place. Although he was left undisturbed in his situation at the university, he was removed from the Council of State during the Hundred Days; but resumed his seat when the fate of his former patron and master was sealed. It is to be regretted that a mind so powerful as that of Cuvier should not have felt the paramount importance of having settled opinions on the great principles of government; and the facility with which he made himself acceptable to the despotic Emperor, the weak and bigoted Bourbons, and the liberal government of Louis Philippe, showed a want of fixed public principle which casts a shade upon the memory of this great man.

As a member of the Council of State he took a distinguished lead, which indeed he never failed to do wherever he was placed, and he was eminently useful by his extraordinary talent for the despatch of business. He was a patient listener, and was never forward with his opinion; he allowed the useless talkers to have their course, and, while he appeared indifferent to what was going on, he was often drawing up a resolution, which his colleagues usually adopted without farther discussion, after he had given a short and luminous exposition of his views. For thirteen years previous to his death he was chairman of the Committee of the Council of State, to which the affairs of the interior belong; and the quantity of business which passed through his hands was wonderful. It was accomplished by his great skill in making those useful with whom he acted; by his talent in keeping his colleagues to the point in their discussions; and by his prodigious readiness of memory, which enabled him to go back at once to former decisions where the principle of the question under deliberation had been already settled. His reading in history had been very extensive, and his attention was ever alive to what was passing around him, as well in other countries as in France; so that he brought to bear on the matter in debate, not speculative opinions merely, but maxims drawn from the experience of past and present times. In the Chamber of Deputies, of which he was a member for several years, he took an active part, and often originated measures. His manner as a speaker was very impressive, and the rich stores of his mind, and his ready and natural eloquence commanded attention. At the end of 1831 he was created a peer; and during the short time he sat in the Upper Chamber, he took a prominent part in its business, and drew up some important reports of committees to which he belonged.

But his reputation as a statesman was confined to France: his achievements in science have spread his fame over the civilized world. We can in this place do little more than mention the titles of the most important of Cuvier’s works; even to name all would carry us beyond our limits. His earliest production was a memoir read before the Natural History Society of Paris, in 1795, and published in the DÉcade Philosophique. In this paper he objects to the divisions of certain of the lower animals adopted by LinnÆus, and proposes a more scientific classification of the mollusca, crustacea, worms, insects, and other invertebrate animals. His attention had been long directed to that branch of natural history, and his subsequent researches in the same department, most of which have been communicated to the world through the medium of the ‘Annales du Museum,’ have thrown great light on that obscure and curious part of the creation. Three years afterwards, he published his Elementary View of the Natural History of Animals, which contains an outline of the lectures he delivered at the Pantheon. In this work he displayed the vast extent of his acquaintance with the works of his predecessors, and, at the same time, the originality of his own mind, by introducing a new arrangement of the animal kingdom, founded on more exact investigation and comparison of the varieties which exist in anatomical structure. With the assistance of his friends, Dumeril and Duvernay, he published, in 1802, his ‘LeÇons d’Anatomie ComparÉe,’ in two volumes, octavo, afterwards extended to five. These are singularly lucid and exact, and form the most complete work on the subject which has yet appeared.

The next important publication we have to notice, is one in which he embodied the results of his extensive researches in a very interesting field of inquiry, concerning the remains of extinct species of animals which are found enveloped in solid rocks, or buried in the beds of gravel that cover the surface of the earth. We are disposed to think his ‘Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles’ the most important of his works, the most illustrious and imperishable monument of his fame. The quarries in the neighbourhood of Paris abound in fossil bones; and he had great facilities for collecting the valuable specimens which were almost daily discovered in the ordinary working of the quarry. When he went to Italy, he had an opportunity of seeing animal remains of the same sort procured by the naturalists of that country from their native soil, and preserved in their museums. His attention became now specially attracted to the subject; and having accumulated materials from all parts of the world, he announced the important truths at which he had arrived in the work above-mentioned, in four quarto volumes, in the year 1812. A new edition, enlarged to five volumes, appeared in 1817, and in 1824 it was extended to seven volumes, illustrated by two hundred engravings. No one who was not profoundly skilled in comparative anatomy could have entered upon the inquiry with any prospect of success; and Cuvier not only possessed that qualification, but was singularly constituted by nature for the task. His powerful memory was particularly susceptible of retaining impressions conveyed to it by the eye: he saw at a glance the most minute variations of form, and what he saw he not only never forgot, but he had the power of representing upon paper with the utmost accuracy and despatch. It is very seldom that the entire skeleton of an animal is found in a fossil state: in most instances the bones have been separated and scattered before they were entombed, and a tusk, a jaw, or a single joint of the back-bone is very often all that is met with, and frequently too in a mutilated state. But an instructed mind like that of Cuvier was able to re-construct the whole animal from the inspection of one fragment. He had discovered by his previous researches such a connexion between the several bones, that a particular curvature, or a small protuberance on a jaw, or a tooth, was sufficient to indicate a particular species of animal, and to prove that the fragment could not have belonged to any other. The ‘Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles’ have made us acquainted with more than seventy species of animals before unknown.

The preliminary discourse in the first volume is a masterly exposition of the revolutions which the crust of the earth has undergone: revolutions to which the animal creation has been equally subject. It is written with great clearness and elegance, and is so much calculated to interest general readers as well as men of science, that it has been translated into most of the European languages. The English translation, by Professor Jameson, published under the title of ‘Essay on the Theory of the Earth,’ has gone through several editions.

In his examination of the fossil bones found near Paris, Cuvier was led to inquire into the geological structure of the country around that capital. He assumed M. Alexander Bronguiart as his associate, and the result of their joint labours is contained in one of the volumes of the work now under consideration, in an Essay on the Mineralogy of the Environs of Paris. This essay formed a great epoch in geological science, for it was then that the grand division of the tertiary formations was first shown to form a distinct class. A new direction and a fresh impulse was thus given to geological investigations; and many of the most important general truths at which we have now arrived in this science, have been established by discoveries to which the essay of Cuvier and Bronguiart led the way.

In 1817 appeared the first edition of the ‘RÈgne Animal,’ in four octavo volumes, one of which was written by the celebrated naturalist Latreille. This work gives an account of the structure and history of all existing and extinct races of animals: it has subsequently been enlarged. Cuvier began, in conjunction with M. Valenciennes, an extensive general work on fishes, which it was calculated would extend to twenty volumes. Eight only have appeared; for the embarrassments among the Parisian booksellers, in 1830, suspended the publication, and it has thus been left incomplete; but a great mass of materials was collected, and we may hope that they will yet be published. In addition to these great undertakings, he had been for years collecting materials for a stupendous work, a complete system of comparative anatomy, to be illustrated by drawings from nature, and chiefly from objects in the Museum at the Jardin des Plantes. Above a thousand drawings, many executed by his own hand, are said to have been made. Looking back to what he had already accomplished, and considering his health and age, for he was only in his sixty-third year, it was not unreasonable in him to hope to see the great edifice erected, of which he had laid the foundation and collected the materials. But unfortunately for the cause of science it was ordered otherwise, and there is something particularly touching in the last words he uttered to his friend the Baron Pasquier, and in sounds, too, scarcely articulate, from the malady which so suddenly cut short his career—“Vous le voyez, il y a loin de l’homme du Mardi (nous nous Étions rencontrÉs ce jour lÀ) À l’homme du Dimanche: et tant de choses, cependant, qui me restaient À faire! trois ouvrages importans À mettre au jour, les matÉriaux prÉparÉs, tout Était disposÉ dans ma tÊte, il ne me restait plus qu’À Écrire.” “You see how it is, how different the man of Tuesday (we had met on that day) from the man of Sunday: and so many things too that remained for me to do! three important works to bring out, the materials prepared, all disposed in order in my head, I had nothing left to do but to write.” In four hours afterwards that wonderfully organized head had become a mere mass of insensible matter.

Besides the works above enumerated, and many memoirs in the transactions of the scientific bodies of Paris, he has given to the world, in four octavo volumes, a History of the Progress of the Physical Sciences, from 1789 to 1827, which evince his genius and extensive erudition. The first volume is a reprint of a report which he presented, as Perpetual Secretary of the Institute, to Napoleon, in 1808, on the Progress of the Physical Sciences from 1789 to 1807. In the same capacity, during thirty-two years, he pronounced the customary Eloges upon deceased members of the Institute. These are collected in three octavo volumes, and bear witness to the versatility of his genius and the extent of his attainments; for whether he is recording the merits of a mathematician, a chemist, a botanist, a geologist, or the cultivator of any other department of science, he shows himself equally conversant with his subject.

He lived at the Jardin des Plantes for nearly forty years, surrounded by the objects which engrossed so great a portion of his thoughts, and there received every Saturday the men of science of Paris, and all others who visited that capital from any part of the world. Professors and pupils met in his rooms to listen with instruction and delight to his conversation, for he was accessible to all. Although compelled to be a very rigid economist of his time, he was so goodnatured and considerate, that if any person who had business to transact with him called at an unexpected hour, he never sent him away; saying, that one who lived so far off had no right to deny himself. Every thing in his house was so arranged as to secure economy of time: his library consisted of several apartments, and each great subject he attended to had a separate room allotted to it; and he usually worked in the apartment belonging to the subject he was at the moment engaged with, so that he might be surrounded with his materials. His ordinary custom, when he returned from attending public business in Paris, was to go at once to his study, passing a few minutes by the way in the room where his family sat; which latterly consisted of Madame Cuvier and her daughter by a former marriage. He came back when dinner was announced, usually with a book in his hand; and returned soon after dinner to his study, where he remained till eleven. He then came to Madame Cuvier’s room, and had generally some of the lighter literature of the day read aloud to him. Sometimes the book selected was of a graver cast, for it is said that during the last year of his life he had the greater part of Cicero read to him. His manner was courteous, kind, and encouraging: every one who took an interest in any subject with which Cuvier was familiar, felt assured that he might approach him without fear of meeting with a cold or discouraging reception.

He had four children, but lost them all. The last taken from him was a daughter, who was suddenly carried off by consumption on the eve of her marriage. He was most tenderly attached to her, and it required all the efforts of his powerful mind to prevent his sinking under the blow. He found distraction by intense thought on other subjects, but not consolation, for the wound never healed.

On Tuesday, the 8th of May, 1832, he opened his usual course at the College of France, with a particularly eloquent introductory lecture, full of enthusiasm in his subject, to the delight of his numerous audience. As he left the room he was attacked with the first symptoms of the disease which was so soon to prove fatal: it was a paralytic seizure. He was well enough, however, to preside the next day at the Committee of the Council of State, but that was the last duty he performed. He died on the following Sunday, leaving behind him an imperishable name, which will be held in honour in the most advanced state of human learning.