Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), French comparative anatomist, specialist in fossil reconstructions and higher education.

Cuvier was born in Montbéliard, in Burgundy. He went to Caroline University, near Stuttgart, Germany, in 1784 to study administrative, juridical, and economic sciences. He also studied natural history and comparative anatomy. When his studies were completed in 1788, Cuvier served as a tutor for a French family.

He moved to Paris in 1795 where he was invited by French naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to study and work at the newly reorganized Museum of Natural History. Cuvier was immediately appointed professor of zoology and assistant professor of animal anatomy.

Because of his background in administrative affairs, his brilliant lecture style, and his engaging personality, Cuvier advanced rapidly, becoming professor at the Collège de France in 1800. He was responsible for reorganizing secondary schools in Bordeaux, Nice, and Marseille and then reorganizing higher education in France. He served in other public service positions, including councillor of state in 1814 and head of the Interior Department of the Council of State in 1819.

With his colleagues, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Cuvier believed that all life could be organized into a continuous series beginning with the simplest organism and ending with humans. However, he broke with this doctrine around 1800, and began to popularize his own idea that four basic body plans existed in the animal world: the Vertebrata, Articulata, Radiata, and Mollusca.

In addition to his classification of animals based on body plan, Cuvier proposed three morphological hypotheses. According to his principle of “correlation of parts,” the structure of each organ of an animal is functionally related to every other organ. In addition, he believed that environment determines the anatomical design of an animal, rather than the design requiring a particular lifestyle. In contrast to the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier argued that species are immutable, stating that the efficient design of each animal is evidence that it could not have changed since its creation.

Using the idea of four basic body plans coupled with his three morphological principles, Cuvier reconstructed ancient forms of life from fossil fragments found in the Paris Basin near Montmartre. These reconstructions, which are still in Paris, helped to build the collections at the museum from 3000 specimens when Cuvier arrived to more than 13,000 in 1832. His great work, Le regne animal (1817), served to further the Cuvierian system of classification, which dominated natural history in England and France until the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species, by British scientist Charles Darwin.

See also Geology.