Cuvier, Georges, baron, 1769-1832

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (French: [kyvje]; 23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology".[1] Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.

Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification.[2] Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. In this way, Cuvier became the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century.[3] His study of the strata of the Paris basin with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy.[4]

Among his other accomplishments, Cuvier established that elephant-like bones found in North America belonged to an extinct animal he later would name as a mastodon, and that a large skeleton dug up in present-day Argentina was of Megatherium, a giant, prehistoric ground sloth. He named the pterosaur Pterodactylus, described (but did not discover or name) the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus, and was one of the first people to suggest the earth had been dominated by reptiles, rather than mammals, in prehistoric times.

Cuvier is also remembered for strongly opposing theories of evolution, which at the time (before Darwin's theory) were mainly proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Cuvier believed there was no evidence for evolution, but rather evidence for cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by global extinction events such as deluges. In 1830, Cuvier and Geoffroy engaged in a famous debate, which is said to exemplify the two major deviations in biological thinking at the time – whether animal structure was due to function or (evolutionary) morphology.[5] Cuvier supported function and rejected Lamarck's thinking.

Cuvier also conducted racial studies which provided part of the foundation for scientific racism, and published work on the supposed differences between racial groups' physical properties and mental abilities.[6] Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman to examinations alongside other French naturalists during a period in which she was held captive in a state of neglect. Cuvier examined Baartman shortly before her death, and conducted an autopsy following her death that disparagingly compared her physical features to those of monkeys.[7]

Cuvier's most famous work is Le Règne Animal (1817; English: The Animal Kingdom). In 1819, he was created a peer for life in honor of his scientific contributions.[8] Thereafter, he was known as Baron Cuvier. He died in Paris during an epidemic of cholera. Some of Cuvier's most influential followers were Louis Agassiz on the continent and in the United States, and Richard Owen in Britain. His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

Cuvier was critical of theories of evolution, in particular those proposed by his contemporaries Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which involved the gradual transmutation of one form into another. He repeatedly emphasized that his extensive experience with fossil material indicated one fossil form does not, as a rule, gradually change into a succeeding, distinct fossil form. A deep-rooted source of his opposition to the gradual transformation of species was his goal of creating an accurate taxonomy based on principles of comparative anatomy.[23] Such a project would become impossible if species were mutable, with no clear boundaries between them. According to the University of California Museum of Paleontology, "Cuvier did not believe in organic evolution, for any change in an organism's anatomy would have rendered it unable to survive. He studied the mummified cats and ibises that Geoffroy had brought back from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and showed they were no different from their living counterparts; Cuvier used this to support his claim that life forms did not evolve over time."[24][25]

Early in his tenure at the National Museum in Paris, Cuvier published studies of fossil bones in which he argued that they belonged to large, extinct quadrupeds. His first two such publications were those identifying mammoth and mastodon fossils as belonging to extinct species rather than modern elephants and the study in which he identified the Megatherium as a giant, extinct species of sloth.[39] His primary evidence for his identifications of mammoths and mastodons as separate, extinct species was the structure of their jaws and teeth.[40] His primary evidence that the Megatherium fossil had belonged to a massive sloth came from his comparison of its skull with those of extant sloth species.[41]

Cuvier wrote of his paleontological method that "the form of the tooth leads to the form of the condyle, that of the scapula to that of the nails, just as an equation of a curve implies all of its properties; and, just as in taking each property separately as the basis of a special equation we are able to return to the original equation and other associated properties, similarly, the nails, the scapula, the condyle, the femur, each separately revel the tooth or each other; and by beginning from each of them the thoughtful professor of the laws of organic economy can reconstruct the entire animal."[42] However, Cuvier's actual method was heavily dependent on the comparison of fossil specimens with the anatomy of extant species in the necessary context of his vast knowledge of animal anatomy and access to unparallelled natural history collections in Paris.[43] This reality, however, did not prevent the rise of a popular legend that Cuvier could reconstruct the entire bodily structures of extinct animals given only a few fragments of bone.[44]

At the time Cuvier presented his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, it was still widely believed that no species of animal had ever become extinct. Authorities such as Buffon had claimed that fossils found in Europe of animals such as the woolly rhinoceros and the mammoth were remains of animals still living in the tropics (i.e. rhinoceros and elephants), which had shifted out of Europe and Asia as the earth became cooler.

Thereafter, Cuvier performed a pioneering research study on some elephant fossils excavated around Paris. The bones he studied, however, were remarkably different from the bones of elephants currently thriving in India and Africa. This discovery led Cuvier to denounce the idea that fossils came from those that are currently living. The idea that these bones belonged to elephants living – but hiding – somewhere on Earth seemed ridiculous to Cuvier, because it would be nearly impossible to miss them due to their enormous size. The Megatherium provided another compelling datapoint for this argument. Ultimately, his repeated identification of fossils as belonging to species unknown to man, combined with mineralogical evidence from his stratigraphical studies in Paris, drove Cuvier to the proposition that the abrupt changes the Earth underwent over a long period of time caused some species to go extinct.[45]

Cuvier's theory on extinction has met opposition from other notable natural scientists like Darwin and Charles Lyell. Unlike Cuvier, they didn't believe that extinction was a sudden process; they believed that like the Earth, animals collectively undergo gradual change as a species. This differed widely from Cuvier's theory, which seemed to propose that animal extinction was catastrophic.

However, Cuvier's theory of extinction is still justified in the case of mass extinctions that occurred in the last 600 million years, when approximately half of all living species went completely extinct within a short geological span of two million years, due in part by volcanic eruptions, asteroids, and rapid fluctuations in sea level. At this time, new species rose and others fell, precipitating the arrival of human beings.

Cuvier's early work demonstrated conclusively that extinction was indeed a credible natural global process.[46] Cuvier's thinking on extinctions was influenced by his extensive readings in Greek and Latin literature; he gathered every ancient report known in his day relating to discoveries of petrified bones of remarkable size in the Mediterranean region.[47]

Influence on Cuvier's theory of extinction was his collection of specimens from the New World, many of them obtained from Native Americans. He also maintained an archive of Native American observations, legends, and interpretations of immense fossilized skeletal remains, sent to him by informants and friends in the Americas. He was impressed that most of the Native American accounts identified the enormous bones, teeth, and tusks as animals of the deep past that had been destroyed by catastrophe.[48]

Cuvier came to believe that most, if not all, the animal fossils he examined were remains of species that had become extinct. Near the end of his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, he said:

All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.
Contrary to many natural scientists' beliefs at the time, Cuvier believed that animal extinction was not a product of anthropogenic causes. Instead, he proposed that humans were around long enough to indirectly maintain the fossilized records of ancient Earth. He also attempted to verify the water catastrophe by analyzing records of various cultural backgrounds. Though he found many accounts of the water catastrophe unclear, he did believe that such an event occurred at the brink of human history nonetheless.

This led Cuvier to become an active proponent of the geological school of thought called catastrophism, which maintained that many of the geological features of the earth and the history of life could be explained by catastrophic events that had caused the extinction of many species of animals. Over the course of his career, Cuvier came to believe there had not been a single catastrophe, but several, resulting in a succession of different faunas. He wrote about these ideas many times, in particular he discussed them in great detail in the preliminary discourse (an introduction) to a collection of his papers, Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (Researches on quadruped fossil bones), on quadruped fossils published in 1812.

Cuvier's own explanation for such a catastrophic event is derived from two different sources, including those from Jean-André Deluc and Déodat de Dolomieu. The former proposed that the continents existing ten millennia ago collapsed, allowing the ocean floors to rise higher than the continental plates and become the continents that now exist today. The latter proposed that a massive tsunami hit the globe, leading to mass extinction. Whatever the case was, he believed that the deluge happened quite recently in human history. In fact, he believed that Earth's existence was limited and not as extended as many natural scientists, like Lamarck, believed it to be.

Much of the evidence he used to support his catastrophist theories have been taken from his fossil records. He strongly suggested that the fossils he found were evidence of the world's first reptiles, followed chronologically by mammals and humans. Cuvier didn't wish to delve much into the causation of all the extinction and introduction of new animal species but rather focused on the sequential aspects of animal history on Earth. In a way, his chronological dating of Earth history somewhat reflected Lamarck's transformationist theories.

Cuvier also worked alongside Alexandre Brongniart in analyzing the Parisian rock cycle. Using stratigraphical methods, they were both able to extrapolate key information regarding Earth history from studying these rocks. These rocks contained remnants of mollusks, bones of mammals, and shells. From these findings, Cuvier and Brongniart concluded that many environmental changes occurred in quick catastrophes, though Earth itself was often placid for extended periods of time in between sudden disturbances.

The 'Preliminary Discourse' became very well known and, unauthorized translations were made into English, German, and Italian (and in the case of those in English, not entirely accurately). In 1826, Cuvier would publish a revised version under the name, Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe (Discourse on the upheavals of the surface of the globe).[49]

After Cuvier's death, the catastrophic school of geological thought lost ground to uniformitarianism, as championed by Charles Lyell and others, which claimed that the geological features of the earth were best explained by currently observable forces, such as erosion and volcanism, acting gradually over an extended period of time. The increasing interest in the topic of mass extinction starting in the late twentieth century, however, has led to a resurgence of interest among historians of science and other scholars in this aspect of Cuvier's work.[50]

Cuvier collaborated for several years with Alexandre Brongniart, an instructor at the Paris mining school, to produce a monograph on the geology of the region around Paris. They published a preliminary version in 1808 and the final version was published in 1811.

In this monograph they identified characteristic fossils of different rock layers that they used to analyze the geological column, the ordered layers of sedimentary rock, of the Paris basin. They concluded that the layers had been laid down over an extended period during which there clearly had been faunal succession and that the area had been submerged under sea water at times and at other times under fresh water. Along with William Smith's work during the same period on a geological map of England, which also used characteristic fossils and the principle of faunal succession to correlate layers of sedimentary rock, the monograph helped establish the scientific discipline of stratigraphy. It was a major development in the history of paleontology and the history of geology.[51]

In 1800 and working only from a drawing, Cuvier was the first to correctly identify in print, a fossil found in Bavaria as a small flying reptile,[52] which he named the Ptero-Dactyle in 1809,[53] (later Latinized as Pterodactylus antiquus)—the first known member of the diverse order of pterosaurs. In 1808 Cuvier identified a fossil found in Maastricht as a giant marine lizard, the first known mosasaur.

Cuvier speculated correctly that there had been a time when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant fauna.[54] This speculation was confirmed over the two decades following his death by a series of spectacular finds, mostly by English geologists and fossil collectors such as Mary Anning, William Conybeare, William Buckland, and Gideon Mantell, who found and described the first ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and dinosaurs.

At the Paris Museum, Cuvier furthered his studies on the anatomical classification of animals. He believed that classification should be based on how organs collectively function, a concept he called functional integration. Cuvier reinforced the idea of subordinating less vital body parts to more critical organ systems as part of anatomical classification. He included these ideas in his 1817 book, The Animal Kingdom.

In his anatomical studies, Cuvier believed function played a bigger role than form in the field of taxonomy. His scientific beliefs rested in the idea of the principles of the correlation of parts and of the conditions of existence. The former principle accounts for the connection between organ function and its practical use for an organism to survive. The latter principle emphasizes the animal's physiological function in relation to its surrounding environment. These findings were published in his scientific readings, including Leçons d'anatomie comparée (Lessons on Comparative Anatomy) between 1800 and 1805,[a] and The Animal Kingdom in 1817.

Ultimately, Cuvier developed four embranchements, or branches, through which he classified animals based on his taxonomical and anatomical studies. He later performed groundbreaking work in classifying animals in vertebrate and invertebrate groups by subdividing each category. For instance, he proposed that the invertebrates could be segmented into three individual categories, including Mollusca, Radiata, and Articulata. He also articulated that species cannot move across these categories, a theory called transmutation. He reasoned that organisms cannot acquire or change their physical traits over time and still retain optimal survival. As a result, he often conflicted with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theories of transmutation.

In 1798, Cuvier published his first independent work, the Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, which was an abridgment of his course of lectures at the École du Pantheon and may be regarded as the foundation and first statement of his natural classification of the animal kingdom.

Mollusks
Cuvier categorized snails, cockles, and cuttlefish into one category he called molluscs (Mollusca), an embranchment. Though he noted how all three of these animals were outwardly different in terms of shell shape and diet, he saw a noticeable pattern pertaining to their overall physical appearance.

Cuvier began his intensive studies of molluscs during his time in Normandy – the first time he had ever seen the sea – and his papers on the so-called Mollusca began appearing as early as 1792.[60] However, most of his memoirs on this branch were published in the Annales du museum between 1802 and 1815; they were subsequently collected as Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'anatomie des mollusques, published in one volume at Paris in 1817.

Fish
Cuvier's researches on fish, begun in 1801, finally culminated in the publication of the Histoire naturelle des poissons, which contained descriptions of 5,000 species of fishes, and was a joint production with Achille Valenciennes. Cuvier's work on this project extended over the years 1828–1831.

n palaeontology, Cuvier published a long list of memoirs, partly relating to the bones of extinct animals, and partly detailing the results of observations on the skeletons of living animals, specially examined with a view toward throwing light upon the structure and affinities of the fossil forms.

Among living forms he published papers relating to the osteology of the Rhinoceros Indicus, the tapir, Hyrax capensis, the hippopotamus, the sloths, the manatee, etc.

He produced an even larger body of work on fossils, dealing with the extinct mammals of the Eocene beds of Montmartre and other localities near Paris, such as the Buttes Chaumont,[61] the fossil species of hippopotamus, Palaeotherium, a marsupial (which he called Didelphys gypsorum), the Megalonyx, the Megatherium, the cave-hyena, the pterodactyl, the extinct species of rhinoceros, the cave bear, the mastodon, the extinct species of elephant, fossil species of manatee and seals, fossil forms of crocodilians, chelonians, fish, birds, etc. If his identification of fossil animals was dependent upon comparison with the osteology of extant animals whose anatomy was poorly known, Cuvier would often publish a thorough documentation of the relevant extant species' anatomy before publishing his analyses of the fossil specimens.[62] The department of palaeontology dealing with the Mammalia may be said to have been essentially created and established by Cuvier.

The results of Cuvier's principal palaeontological and geological investigations ultimately were given to the world in the form of two separate works: Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes (Paris, 1812; later editions in 1821 and 1825); and Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe (Paris, 1825). In this latter work he expounded a scientific theory of Catastrophism.

The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne Animal)uvier's most admired work was his Le Règne Animal. It appeared in four octavo volumes in 1817; a second edition in five volumes was brought out in 1829–1830. In this classic work, Cuvier presented the results of his life's research into the structure of living and fossil animals. With the exception of the section on insects, in which he was assisted by his friend Latreille, the whole of the work was his own. It was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material updating the book in accordance with the expansion of knowledge.

Racial studies
Cuvier was a Protestant and a believer in monogenism, who held that all men descended from the biblical Adam, although his position usually was confused as polygenist. Some writers who have studied his racial work have dubbed his position as "quasi-polygenist", and most of his racial studies have influenced scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). Cuvier claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian, the original race of mankind. The other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other.[6][63]

Cuvier categorized these divisions he identified into races according to his perception of the beauty or ugliness of their skulls and the quality of their civilizations. Cuvier's racial studies held the supposed features of polygenism, namely fixity of species; limits on environmental influence; unchanging underlying type; anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races; physical and mental differences between distinct races.[6]

Sarah Baartman
Alongside other French naturalists, Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman, a South African Khokhoi woman exhibited in European freak shows as the "Hottentot Venus", to examinations. At the time that Cuvier interacted with Baartman, Baartman's "existence was really quite miserable and extraordinarily poor. Sara was literally [sic] treated like an animal."[64] In 1815, while Baartman was very ill, Cuvier commissioned a nude painting of her. She died shortly afterward, aged 26.[65]

Following Baartman's death, Cuvier sought out and received permission to dissect her body, focusing on her genitalia, buttocks and skull shape. In his examination, Cuvier concluded that many of Baartman's features more closely resembled the anatomy of a monkey than a human.[7] Her remains were displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1970, then were put into storage.[66] Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2002.[67]

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French zoologist, paleontologist and historian of science. A committed empiricist, Cuvier opposed theories, arguing that scientists should limit themselves to describing. In zoology his work depended upon his dominant position at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, which was the largest scientific research institution of the era. French government expeditions brought specimens from distant lands to build its collections. Upon his arrival at the Museum Cuvier rearranged its comparative anatomy collections, assembled at the end of the seventeenth century by Claude Perrault and in the middle of the eighteenth century by Louis Jean Marie Daubenton. Although Cuvier traveled little, he published three works of general zoology: Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux(1797), Leçons d'anatomie comparèe with C. Duméril and G. Duverney (1800, 1805) and Le règne animal(1817) arranged according to his new system of classification. Perhaps his greatest contribution was the Histoire des poisons, begun in Normandy and continuing after his death, which provided the basis of modern ichthyology.

Cuvier was born at Montbéliard in Württemberg on August 23, 1769, the son of a poor (but still middle class) soldier who was a retired French officer married to a woman twenty years his junior. He was born with a delicate constitution and enjoyed drawing as a child, but also demonstrated a precocious intellectual development and an astonishing memory. Among his childhood accomplishments was to master the entire corpus of Buffon's works by the age of twelve, to begin a natural history collection and to found a scientific society with some friends. Montbéliard, originally part of Burgundy, had been subject to the duke of Württemberg and adopted the Lutheran faith during the Reformation. Cuvier's parents intended that he become a Lutheran minister like his uncle, but he was unable to obtain a scholarship to study theology at Tübingen. Instead, the wife of the governor of Montbéliard recommended him to attend the Caroline University. He entered the University in 1784 at the age of fifteen and after two years of general studies, during which he learned German. Cuvier specialized in administrative, juridical and economic sciences, but the curriculum included a considerable amount of natural history. Cuvier's zoology teacher the gifted twenty-year-old Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer became one of the founders of the German school of Naturphilosophie. Kielmeyer taught Cuvier the art of dissection, and probably also comparative anatomy, taught in Tübingen by J.F. Blumenbach.

After three years in 1787, Cuvier won the golden cross of chevaliers, which allowed him to live and learn with children of the aristocracy, and sometimes with the Duke Württemberg himself. Cuvier finished his studies in 1788, and since there were no vacant positions at court, he was forced to accept a position as private tutor in Normandy with an affluent Protestant aristocratic family named d'Héricy. Despite the beginnings of the French Revolution in 1789, his duties as tutor over the next six years kept him away from the radical events and influences of the Revolution. Instead, his life in Caen gave him access to a rich library and botanical garden. In the spring and summer months he accompanied the d'Héricy family to the Château of Fiquainville near the fishing port of Fécamp. There he had an opportunity to dissect many marine animals and shorebirds. He began keeping notes nearly every day together with sketches in large notebooks. Following Carl Linnaeus, he called these his Diarium zoologicum and Diarium botanicum.

Also during this period Cuvier corresponded with his friend and closest disciple Christian Heinrich Pfaff at the Caroline University, in order to keep in touch with the University and ducal administration and to provide political intelligence. Cuvier feigned sympathy for the Revolution, since he ran the risk that his mail might be opened by the police; however, he often later expressed his fear and disapproval of the revolutionary regime in which he asserted "the populace made the law." The Cuvier-Pfaff correspondence is doubly important to the historian of science because during the five-year period between his nineteenth and twenty-third birthdays he acquired the basic scientific ideas he would develop over the course of his career—a "chain of being," and an uncompromising empiricism divorced from theory. He wrote to Pfaff in 1788: "I wish everything that experience shows us to be carefully disassociated from hypotheses . . . . [S]cience should be based upon facts, despite systems." In his first publication, a study of wood lice that appeared in the Journal d'histoire naturelle, he appears to have affirmed the notion of a complex chain of being, when he stated, "Here, as elsewhere, nature makes no jumps . . .therefore, the descent is by degrees from crayfish to Squilla, from Squilla to Asellidae, then to lice, to Armadilladiidae and to galley worms. All of these genera must be related to a single class."

Cuvier became a French citizen in 1793, as a result of the French annexation of Montbéliard. Consequently, he sought recognition within Parisian scientific circles. At the suggestion of agronomist H.A. Tessier he sent a selection of his unpublished scientific works to Professor Ètienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The youthful Saint-Hilaire enthusiastically encouraged Cuvier to come to Paris, which he did in 1795. Shortly after his arrival, Cuvier drew upon the observations of earlier dissections that he had performed in Normandy and presented a paper that represented a new stage in the study of invertebrates. Much later in 1829 he testified that "Before me modern naturalists divided all nonvertebrate animals into two classes, insects and worms. I was the first . . . to offer another division . . . in which I pointed out the characteristics and limits of mollusks, crustaceans, insects, worms, echinoderms and zoophytes." Cuvier's new classifications proved so influential that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the introduction to his zoology course decided "to follow to a very great extent [the classification] devised by the learned naturalist Cuvier." Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier worked together for about a year, during which the former, no doubt, influenced by his new associate, dropped his hostility and affirmed the notion of a chain of being. In a jointly published paper on tarsiers [the smallest of primates], they suggested the genus might be considered a link between quadrumana and Chiroptera or bats. In another paper on orangutans, they boldly proposed the theory that the origin of species was from a single type. Cuvier's Histoire des poisons, begun in Normandy was a work that he gradually improved and published in collaboration with Achille Valenciennes. The volumes began appearing in 1828 and continued long after Cuvier's death, only stopping with the twenty-second volume in 1849 with Valenciennes's passing. Cuvier's classifications of fishes were so solid that they established the bases of modern ichthyology; many of his classes becoming orders or suborders in the current classification system.

Cuvier was also famous for his paleontological reconstructions, which had the living creatures as their point of departure. Taking a holistic perspective, he said the living being constitutes "a unique closed system, all parts of which mutually correspond and concur in the same definitive action through a reciprocal reaction. None of these parts can change without changing others, as well . . . ." So, for example, a carnivore ought to have intestines capable of digesting meat, as well as sharp claws and teeth to seize its prey and powerful jaws and muscles appropriate to the osseous structure. As a result, Cuvier asserted that every well preserved piece of bone potentially allows the zoologist to determine the class, order, genus and (even) species from which the specimen came. In addition to his general zoological works and his work on fishes and mollusks, Cuvier made important contributions to the history of science. As permanent secretary of the Academy, Cuvier had to write and deliver periodic reports on the progress of French research in the sciences, reports bound in four volues in 1828 and five volumes again in 1833. He also had responsibility for composing elegies for deceased members of the Academy. Finally, he wrote articles for Michaud's Biographie universelle on Aristotle, Buffon, Daubenton, Linnaeus, Pliny and Vicq d'Azyr among others.

Cuvier's rapid rise to fame resulted both from the significance of his scientific work and his abilities as a teacher and administrator. Typically, after only a few minutes of preparation, he was able to deliver a logically constructed lecture in a confident manner; and without pausing illustrated his ideas in blackboard drawings that were clear and accurate. In April 1796, at only twenty-six years of age he became a member of the Class of Physical Sciences at the Institut de France. Four years later in 1800 he succeeded the celebrated naturalist Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton as a professor at the Collège de France, and was given the administrative responsibility for reorganizing the lycèes of Bordeaux, Nice and Mareseilles. In 1803 Cuvier assumed the well-paid duties of permanent secretary for the physical sciences at the Institut. In 1808, after the Empire had replaced the Consulate, Napoleon appointed Cuvier university counselor. In this position he contributed greatly to the organization of the new Sorbonne. Afterward, he was sent on missions to Italy, the Netherlands and southern Germany to reorganize their systems of higher education. In recompense he received the title and endowment of chevalier in 1811. Cuvier fared equally well under the Bourbons of the restored monarchy in 1814. Although supportive of the exercise and growth of Protestantism in an era of ultraroyalist hostility, he became a devoted servant of the French kings. He was director of Protestant universities, and in 1814 became councilor of state. From 1819 until his death he presided over the Council of State, and daily at eleven o'clock attended to the business of the council of state or the council of public instruction. Monday afternoons he set aside for the Institute.

Cuvier was always busy, always in a hurry. He had an immense workload of scientific and administrative duties, and as he grew older, he grew busier. He was open to flattery, and easily irritated. A nepotist, he obtained positions for friends and relatives. He was very secretive and very authoritarian. Nevertheless, he was kind to aspiring young persons, both assisting and advising them.

A proponent of enlightened despotism, Cuvier seemed to fare well under every political regime. He was short, and during the Revolution very thin. He grew stout during the Empire, and enormously fat after the restoration. Nicknamed "Mammoth," he appeared as a sort of bishop of science. In February of 1804 he married Mme. Davaucelle, a devout Protestant widow with four children, who bore him four more. She was a kind, energetic and outspoken spouse, who saw to everything, including the naturalist's favorite Montbèliard chitterling sausages that were never missing from the table. Nevertheless, his happiness was darkened by the death of his four children, and he tried to overcome his grief by incessant toil. One evening in May, 1832 Cuvier experienced a slight paralysis and contraction of his esophagus. He became weaker over the next few days, and died on May 13.

A major source of Cuvier's strength as a scientist, teacher and administrator lay in his powerful memory. He had 19,000 volumes in his library, as well as thousands of pamphlets, the contents of which he had committed to memory and could retrieve within seconds as needed.