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CUVIER 599 appointment of president to the entire council of state only wanted the king's signature when Ouvier expired. Ouvier lost his mother in 1793, and his father in 1795. In 1803 he mar- ried Mme. Duvaucel, a widow with three sons and a daughter, the latter of whom devoted herself to him in his last illness ; by this mar- riage he had four children, of whom three died early; his only remaining child, Clementine, died in 1828, at the age of 22, on the eve of marriage ; his wife and two of her first chil- dren survived him. On May 8, 1832, he opened his course of lectures at the college de France. After the first lecture he felt slight pain and numbness in the right arm, and his throat became affected ; on the third day both arms were seized, and the power of swallow- ing was lost, all his mental faculties and the power of speech remaining unaffected ; he was perfectly calm and resigned. Four hours be- fore he died he was carried at his own request into the cabinet where the happiest and proud- est hours of his .life had been spent, and where he wished to draw his last breath. Feeble in his youth, by the time he arrived in Paris his health was seriously deranged ; but the excite- ment of new studies, the change in his habits, and the exertion of lecturing, worked such an alteration that he enjoyed good health until his final illness. He was below the middle stature, with very fair skin and reddish hair up to the age of 30 ; as his health improved, his hair became darker ; at 45 he grew stout, but was always well ; at 60 he scarcely seemed more than 50 ; according to Duvernoy, he never used spectacles when reading or writing. Cu- vier's brain was remarkably large, weighing be- tween 59 and 60 oz., nearly a pound more than the average ; the excess was caused almost en- tirely by the great development of the cerebral hemispheres, the seat of the intellectual facul- ties. A history of Cuvier's labors in the domain of natural history would be the history of nat- ural science in the first half of the 19th cen- tury. Linnaeus in 1735 published his Sy sterna Naturae, a mere sketch of the animal kingdom, but still a simple and valuable classification. When Ouvier formed a system based on the invariable characters of anatomical structure instead of external resemblances, he discovered the true basis of a natural classification. He first introduced the division, founded on differ- ent plans of structure, of radiata, mollmca, articulata, and vertebrata ; and this has been the basis of all modern improvements in zo- ology. The grand idea of Cuvier was to dis- cover the plan of created beings by the study and comparison of the intimate structure of their organism. With him comparative an- atomy and zoology went hand in hand ; and from their united facts he deduced the laws of a new science, that of fossil animal life, aston- ishing the world with the magnitude of his conceptions and the grandeur of his discoveries. Linnseus had included in his class of worms all animals which have not red blood, more than half of the animal kingdom. Cuvier's first re- searches were on this class of animals, which in 1795 he divided into the classes of his inver- tebrate series. His very first observations in 1792 were on the anatomy of the common patella, certain dipterous insects, and crustace- ans, in the second volume of the Journal cPhis- toire naturelle. Since the time of Aristotle, the invertebrata had always been neglected until Ouvier published his divisions in 1795, from which may be dated the reformation of natural history. In the same year he studied the structure of the mollusca, divided them into orders, and commenced a series of observations which resulted in his memoir on the history and anatomy of mollusks, published in 1817. Comparative anatomy was the basis of Cuvier's zoology, and we find memoirs on this subject from 1795 to 1831 ; the Le$ons (Vanatomie ' comparee was but the preface to a more ex- tended work, whose plan he had nearly com- pleted when death overtook him ; such as it is, a monument of vast labor, it has furnished ma- terials for the development of this science, and has from its own stores enabled critics to point out unavoidable deficiencies ; from a heap of dry, unconnected facts concerning the structure of animals, he obtained the general laws of or- ganization, the limit of variation in each organ, the marked influence of some upon the general system, the subordination of many, and the co- existence or incompatibility of others. Among the prominent points are : the development of the teeth ; the structure of the larynx of birds, of the nasal fossae and organs of hearing in ce- taceans, and of the respiratory organs in the perennibrarichiate amphibia; the comparison of the brain in the vertebrata, and the relation of its development to the intelligence ; the res- piration, animal heat, muscular force, sensory and digestive systems of these animals. For this treatise he received one of the decennial prizes instituted by Napoleon in 1810. Cuvier in his scientific labors stated positively only that which he knew from personal observation, and therefore early directed his attention to collecting objects of natural history ; the great collection at the jardin des plantes, made chiefly through his own exertions, contributed the materials of which he made such remark- able use ; this collection was also necessary for the determination of fossil species, which he began to investigate while residing in Norman- dy. In 1796 appeared his memoir on the skele- tons of the megalonyx and megatherium, and on the skulls of fossil bears from the caverns of Gaylenreuth ; from this period till 1812 he con- tributed many papers on fossil bones, the most important of which were printed in the Annales du museum d'histoire naturelle, and afterward published under the title of JRecTierches sur les ossemens fossiles (4 vols. 4to, 1812 ; 2d ed., 1817 ; 3d ed., 1825, with a preliminary discourse on the "Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe "). Deposits of mollusks and other ma- rine animals had long been known to exist at