Georges Cuvier - Biography

Biography

Cuvier was born in Montbéliard, France (in department of Doubs), where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation. His father, Jean George Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards and a bourgeois of the town of Montbéliard; his mother was Anne Clémence Chatel. At the time the town which was annexed to France on 10 October 1793 belonged to the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother, who was much younger than his father, tutored him diligently throughout his early years so that he easily surpassed the other children at school. During his gymnasium years, he had little trouble acquiring Latin and Greek, and was always at the head of his class in mathematics, history, and geography. According to Lee, "The history of mankind was, from the earliest period of his life, a subject of the most indefatigable application; and long lists of sovereigns, princes, and the driest chronological facts, once arranged in his memory, were never forgotten."

Soon after entering the gymnasium, at age 10, he encountered a copy of Gesner's Historiae Animalium, the work that first sparked his interest in natural history. He then began frequent visits to the home of a relation where he could borrow volumes of Buffon's massive Histoire Naturelle. All of these he read and re-read, retaining so much of the information that by the age of twelve "he was as familiar with quadrupeds and birds as a first-rate naturalist." He remained at the gymnasium for four years.

Cuvier spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework. Although he knew no German on his arrival, after only nine months study he managed to win the school prize for that language. Upon graduation, he had no money to await appointment to academic office. So in July 1788 he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the only son of the Comte d'Héricy, a Protestant noble. It was here during the early 1790s that he began his comparisons of fossils with extant forms. Cuvier regularly attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics. There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier (1741–1837), a physician and well-known agronomist who had fled the Terror in Paris and assumed a false identity. After hearing Tessier speak on agricultural matters, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in the Encyclopédie Méthodique and addressed him as M. Tessier. Tessier replied in dismay, "I am known, then, and consequently lost." — " Lost!" replied M. Cuvier; "no; you are henceforth the object of our most anxious care." They soon became intimate and Tessier introduced Cuvier to his colleagues in Paris — "I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy", he wrote his friend Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. As a result Cuvier entered into correspondence with several leading naturalists of the day and was invited to Paris. Arriving in the spring of 1795, at the age of 26, he soon became the assistant of Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), who had been appointed to the newly created chair of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes.

The Institut de France was founded in the same year, and he was elected a member of its Academy of Sciences. In 1796 he began to lecture at the École Centrale du Pantheon, and at the opening of the National Institute in April, he read his first paleontological paper, which was subsequently published in 1800 under the title Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles. In this paper he analyzed skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants as well as mammoth fossils, and a fossil skeleton known at that time as the 'Ohio animal'. Cuvier's analysis established, for the first time, the fact that African and Indian elephants were different species and that mammoths were not the same species as either African or Indian elephants and therefore must be extinct. He further stated that the 'Ohio animal' represented a distinct extinct species that was even more different from living elephants than mammoths were. Years later, in 1806, he would return to the 'Ohio animal' in another paper and give it the name Mastodon.

In his second paper in the year 1796, he would describe and analyze a large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he would name Megatherium. He concluded that this skeleton represented yet another extinct animal and, by comparing its skull with living species of tree dwelling sloths, that it was a kind of ground dwelling giant sloth. Together these two 1796 papers were a landmark event in the history of paleontology and in the development of comparative anatomy as well. They also greatly enhanced Cuvier's personal reputation, and they essentially ended what had been a long running debate about the reality of extinction.

In 1799 he succeeded Daubenton as professor of natural history in the Collège de France. In 1802 he became titular professor at the Jardin des Plantes; and in the same year he was appointed commissary of the Institute to accompany the inspectors general of public instruction. In this latter capacity he visited the south of France; but in the early part of 1803, he was chosen Permanent Secretary of the Department of Physical Sciences of the Academy, and he consequently abandoned the earlier appointment and returned to Paris. In 1806, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society and in 1812, a foreign members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

He now devoted himself more especially to three lines of inquiry: (i) the structure and classification of the Mollusca; (ii) the comparative anatomy and systematic arrangement of the fishes; (iii) fossil mammals and reptiles and, secondarily, the osteology of living forms belonging to the same groups.

In 1812, Cuvier made what Bernard Heuvelmans called his "Rash Dictum": he remarked that it was unlikely that any large animal remained undiscovered. The word "dinosaur" was coined in 1842.

During his lifetime Cuvier served as an Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of the Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural science.

Cuvier was by birth, education, and conviction a devout Lutheran, and remained protestant throughout his all life while regularly attending Church services. Despite he regarded his personal faith to be a private matter he evidently identified himself with his confessional minority group when he supervised governmental educational programs for protestants and was also very active in founding Parisian Biblical Society in 1818 where he later served as a vice-president. From 1822 until his death in 1832, Cuvier was Grand Master of the Protestant Faculties of Theology of the French University.