Georges Cuvier, The animal kingdom arranged in conformity with its organization; Volume 3: Mammalia (1827)

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist and zoologist, considered by some to be the inventor of modern biology. As the first to understand animal anatomy from the point of view of adaptation for survival in a specific environment, he was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and vertebrate palaeontology. He is also credited with helping to establish extinction as a fact.

“It is a great misfortune to science that zoological systems are necessarily not merely the creatures on human inventions, but, to a certain extent also, of human fancy and caprice: they have none of the certainty of mathematics, but partake more of that indefinite point of excellence which belongs to painting; the chef d’œuvres of a Raphael might be better, and the best zoological arrangement will ever be capable of improvement.”

The animal kingdom (Le Règne Animal) is Cuvier’s most famous work. Building on the work of Carl Linnaeus, it describes the structure of the whole animal kingdom, based on comparative anatomy and natural history. Where Linnaeus divided the animal kingdom into five groups (mammals, birds, amphibians, fishes, insects, and soft invertebrates), Cuvier identified only four groups: vertebrates, mollusks, articulata and radiata. This new system ordered nature from the lowest organism to the highest based on a neuro-cerebral hierarchy.

The book was widely read and many, including Charles Darwin, felt that Cuvier’s descriptions of groups of related animals, both living and extinct, provided convincing evidence for evolutionary change – though Cuvier himself rejected the possibility of evolution. Cuvier’s taxonomy also had important implications for defining the boundaries between the animal and the human and, by extension, creating a hierarchy within the human race. In his other work, Cuvier classified humanity into three distinct races, privileging the white above the others. Restoring this book to a usable state will facilitate further study of the ways in which such developments in natural history provided a basis for the emergence of scientific racism in the nineteenth century.

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