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Henri de Blainville and the animal series: A nineteenth-century chain of being

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References

  1. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, 3 vols. (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), I, ii.

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  2. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), I, viii-xv.

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  3. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), III, 336–338.

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  4. On Cuvier's reformation of taxonomy through comparative anatomy and his rejection of the chain of being, see Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck: les classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790–1830), 2 vols. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926); and William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, Zoologist: A Study in the History of Evolution Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

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  5. For biographical material on Blainville, see Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, 4 vols. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), I, i-ccxxiii; Pierre Flourens, “Eloge de Marie Henri Ducrotay de Blainville”, Académie des Sciences, Mémoires, 27, 2nd part (1860), i–lx; and William Coleman, “Blainville”, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, II, 186–188.

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  6. Cuvier's role in the dispensing of patronage in French science is discussed in my Ph.D. diss., “The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate and the Structure of Nineteenth Century French Zoology”, Princeton University, 1975, chap. 2.

  7. Blainville appears to have been a most difficult man to get along with. Compared by his biographers to Molière's misanthrope, Alceste, Blainville spent his later years buried behind a pile of books in his office and rarely spoke to anyone. See Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. clx, clxiv; and Flourens, “Eloge”, p. xxii.

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  8. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. xlii-xliv, cciii–cciv; E. T. Hamy, “Notes intimes sur Georges Cuvier, redigées en 1836, par Dr. Quoy pour son ami J. Desjardins de Maurice”, Archives de Médecine Navale, 86 (1906), 458.

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  9. On the details of this election, see Appel, “The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate”, pp. 229–233.

  10. The major results of this research were Manuel de malacologie et de conchyliologie, 2 vols. (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1825–1827); Mémoire sur les bélemnites considerées zoologiquement et géologiquement (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1827); “Vers”, Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles, 57 (1828), 365–625; and “Zoophytes”, ibid., 60 (1830), 1–546, later published separately as Manuel d'actinologie ou de zoophytologie, 2 vols. (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1834).

  11. Blainville's letter to Lamarck (undated) is published Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. lxxiv-lxxxvi.

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  12. The politics of this election are discussed in Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. lxxxiv-lxxxix.

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  13. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), III, 335–336; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1890), p. 429.

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  14. For Blainville's evaluation of Cuvier, see his Histoire des sciences, III, 370–411; and Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, passim.

  15. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville”, in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), p. cxvii; Blainville, Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, pp. 2–3; Flourens, “Eloge”, p. xxiv.

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  16. Appel, “Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate”, passim (especially chap. 2).

  17. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, De l'organisation des animaux, ou principes d'anatomie comparée (Paris: Levrault, 1822), pp. iii, lv–lvi; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Sur les principes de zooclassie, ou de la classification des animaux (Paris: Fain et Thunot, 1847), pp. 1–3. More specifically, for Blainville, religion revealed scientific truths a priori, which science demonstrated a posteriori.

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  18. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), I, vi, III, 336–338.

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  19. For Blainville's evaluation of Lamarck's work, see Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), III, 411–466. quotation on p. 463. Summing up Lamarck's scientific achievements, Blainville wrote: “He has felt and often proved the animal series, the series of the creation” (ibid., III, 527).

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  20. Oken's work is analyzed in Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), III, 466–514, 527–528.

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  21. Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, vols. 7–9 in Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Nauchatel: S. Fauche, 1779–1783), VII, 52–53.

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  22. Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, vols. 7–9 in Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Nauchatel: S. Fauche, 1779–1783), VII, 174. A foldout of Bonnet's chain of being, beginning with man and ending with the four elements and “more subtle matter”, may be found in his Oeuvres, I, facing p. 1. See also Lorin Anderson, “Charles Bonnet's Taxonomy and the Chain of Being”, J. Hist. Ideas, 37 (1976), 45–58.

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  23. Georges Cuvier, “Eloge historique de Ch. Bonnet et d'Horace-Bénédict de Saussure”, in Cuvier, Recueil des éloges historiques lus dans les séances publiques de l'Institut Royal de France, 3 vols. (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1819–1827), I, 400–401.

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  24. Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, vols. 7–9 in Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Nauchatel: S. Fauche, 1779–1783), VII, 51–54.

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  25. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Vie, travaux et doctrine scientifique d'Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1847; reprint ed., Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1968), pp. 43, 131.

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  26. Georges Cuvier, “Mémoire sur les cloportes terrestres”, Journal d'Histoire Naturelle, 2 (1792), 18–31, esp. 18–19.

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  27. Georges Cuvier, Leçons d'anatomie comparée, 5 vols. (Paris: Baudouin, 1800–1805), I, 59–60.

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  28. Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck: les classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790–1830), (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926), II, 91–109; Georges Cuvier, “Sur un nouveau rapprochement a établir entre les classes qui composent le règne animal”, Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Annales, 19, 1812, pp. 73–84.

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  29. Georges Cuvier and Achille Valenciennes, Histoire naturelle des poissons, I (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1828), pp. 544–545.

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  30. Cuvier, “Sur un nouveau rapprochement”, pp. 80–81.

  31. Georges Cuvier, Le règne animal, 4 vols. (Paris: Déterville, 1817), I, xxi. Yet even Cuvier continued to arrange animals in a rough serial order. Cuvier's ordering of mammals in particular was not very different from Blainville's serial arrangement of mammals.

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  32. Georges Cuvier, “Nature”, Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles, 34 (1825), 261–268, quotation on p. 266.

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  33. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, “Prodrome d'une nouvelle distribution systematique du règne animal”, Journal de Physique, 83 (1816), 244–267; also in Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1816, pp. 105–124.

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  34. Anon., Review of “Académie des Sciences: éloge historique de de Marie-Henri Ducrotay de Blainville,” Brit. Quart. Review, 24 (July–October 1856), 365–380, quotation on p. 376. For other criticisms of Blainville's terminology, see Pierre Flourens, review of Blainville, Osteographie, in Journal des Savants (1850), p. 332; Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification, ed. Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 222. For a fascinating satire written in 1847 on Blainville's terminology, see Appel, “Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate,” pp. 381–382.

  35. Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 248.

  36. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, “Prodrome d'une nouvelle distribution systematique du règne animal”, Journal de Physique, 83 (1816), pp. 246–247 and Table 1. Blainville established the articulo-mollusks by 1814, well before his break with Cuvier, although they were then still included within the mollusks. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Sur la classification méthodique des animaux mollusques, et établissement d'une nouvelle considération pour y parvenir,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1814, pp. 175–180.

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  37. Ibib., pp. 247, 257, 266.

  38. Ibid., pp. 246–247. By some, Blainville was considered the first to employ the term “type” as a zoological taxon. See Julius Victor Carus, Histoire de la zoologie depuis l'antiquité jusqu'au XIX siècle, trans. P. O. Hagenmuler (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1880), p. 300.

  39. On Geoffroy and the concept of homology, see Appel, “Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate,” chap. 3, and Edward Stuart Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology (New York: Dutton, 1917), chap. 5. Actually, Geoffroy used the term “analogy,” but he used it in the way we now use “homology.” The modern clarification of the terms “homology” and “analogy” is due to Richard Owen. See Russell, Form and Function, p. 108.

  40. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Mémoire sur l'opercule des poissons,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1817, pp. 104–112; Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 255.

  41. Geoffroy came to the controversial conclusion that the bones of the operculum in fish corresponded to the tiny bones of the inner ear (the malleus, stapes, and incus) of mammals. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie anatomique: des organes respiratoires sous le rapport de la détermination et de l'identité de leurs pièces osseuses (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1818; reprint ed., Brussels; Culture et Civilisation, 1968), pp. 15–30.

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  42. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Sur l'existence de véritables ongles à l'aile de quelques espèces d'oiseaux,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1819, p. 41.

  43. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Considérations sur les organes de la génération,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1818, pp. 155–162.

  44. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Note sur l'existence des nerfs olfactifs dans le dauphin, et, par analogie, dans les autres cétacés,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1815, pp. 193–195.

  45. Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 248; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Mammifères (Organisation),” in Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle, XIX (Paris: Déterville, 1818), pp. 75–152, esp. pp. 75–76, 85–87, 90–92.

  46. Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 265. On the transcendental anatomy of insects, see Russell, Form and Function, pp. 83–87; and Appel, “Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate,” pp. 212–229, 404–413.

  47. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Considérations générales sur le squelette des animaux vertebrés et articulés,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1817, p. 109; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Note sur les animaux articulés,” Journal de Physique, 89 (1819), 467–472; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Sur la concordance des anneaux du corps des Entomozoaires hexapodes adultes,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1820, pp. 33–37.

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  48. Henri Hollard, Leçon faite le 28 mai à la Faculté des Sciences pour la reprise du cours de zoologie interrompu par le mort de M. Blainville (Paris: Labé, 1850), pp. 19–20; Nicard, “Etude sur M. de Blainville,” p. clxxiv.

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  49. Russell, Form and Function, p. 94; Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Sur la dégradation du coeur et des gros vaisseaux dans les Ostéozoaires, ou animaux vertébrés,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1819, pp. 148–154, esp. p. 148.

  50. Henri Marie DucrotaydeBlainville, De l'organisation des animaux, ou principes d'anatomie comparée (Paris: Levrault, 1822), pp. 4–5.

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  51. Ibid.; Blainville, Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, pp. 199–201, 345–350.

  52. See, e.g., Blainville, Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, pp. 293, 312–313, 432–433, 435–436.

  53. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Animal,” in Supplement to Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles (Paris and Strasbourg, 1840). Only one volume of this supplement (A-Aye) was ever published. I used an extracted form of Blainville's article obtained from the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass. Quotation on p. 8.

  54. Ibid., pp. 8–9.

  55. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, De l'organisation des animaux, ou principes d'anatomie comparée (Paris: Levrault, 1822), p. 5.

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  56. Appel, “Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate,” chaps. 4 and 5.

  57. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation 010 et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, I, xxi; Blainville, “Animal,” p. 8. (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858)

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  58. Blainville, Principes de zooclassie, p. 28.

  59. Richard Owen more explicitly denied the possibility of explaining morphological patterns by strict teleological reasoning. He and a number of other zoologists came to regard homologies as examples of a higher teleology. See Dov Ospovat, “Perfect Adaptation and Teleological Explanation: Approaches to the Problem of the History of Life in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 2 (1978), 33–56, esp. 36, 49.

  60. Blainville, “Animal,” pp. 19–20.

  61. Ibid., p. 20.

  62. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, De l'organisation des animaux, ou principes d'anatomie comparée (Paris: Levrault, 1822), tables, p. 3; Blainville, “Mammifères (Organisation),”, pp. 115–123; Blainville, “Animal,” p. 10.

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  63. Blainville, “Animal,” pp. 10–17.

  64. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

  65. Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, vols. 7–9 in Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Nauchatel: S. Fauche, 1779–1783), VII, 131–137, quotation on p. 134.

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  66. Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, vols. 7–9 in Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Nauchatel: S. Fauche, 1779–1783), p. 162 and note.

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  67. Richard W. BurkhardtJr., The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), chap. 6. For an example of Lamarck's use of the term “anomaly,” see Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, I (Paris: Verdière, 1815), p. xii.

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  68. Blainville, Manuel de malacologie, I, 6.

  69. Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 245; Blainville, “Animal,” pp. 20–21.

  70. Blainville, “Mammifères (Organisation),” pp. 114, 133–152.

  71. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, “Nouvelle classification des mammifères,” Annales Françaises et Etrangères d'Anatomie et de Physiologie, 3 (1839), 268–269; Nicard, “Etude sur M. de Blainville,” p. clxxxi.

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  72. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, “Prodrome d'une nouvelle distribution systematique du règne animal”, Journal de Physique, 83 (1816), 253–254, 259; Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck,; I, 179–190; Blainville, “Animal,” pp. 24–25.

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  73. Georges Cuvier, Le règne animal, (Paris: Déterville, 1817), I, 169–171, 224–227. In the second edition of Le règne animal, 5 vols. (Paris: Déterville, 1829–1830) Cuvier made the marsupials into a separate order following the carnivores, but retained the monotremes with the edentates (I, 172–174, 233–236).

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  74. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, “Mémoire sur la nature du produit femelle de la génération dans l'ornithorynque,” Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Nouvelles Annales, 2 (1833), 369–416, esp. 409.

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  75. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Dissertation sur la place que la famille des ornithorynques et des échidnés doit occuper dans les series naturelles (Paris: Lebéque, 1812), p. 101. It was this dissertation that Blainville presented for the competition to obtain the chair at the Faculty of Sciences.

  76. Blainville, “Mémoire sur la nature du produit female de la génération dans l'ornithorynque,” p. 407; Blainville, “Prodrome,” p. 251; Blainville, “Animal,” p. 22. On the classification of marsupials and monotremes, see Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck, I, 155–168; and Kathleen G. Dugan, “Marsupials and Monotremes: The Role of Anomaly in Biological Theory,” Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1980.

  77. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), I, i-xxiii, III, 515–530; Blainville, Principes de zooclassie, pp. 37–44. In addition to being a devout Catholic, Blainville was also a confirmed Royalist. On his political views, see Nicard, “Etude sur M. de Blainville,” pp. cliv-clviii.

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  78. Flourens, “Eloge,” p. xxiv.

  79. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville,” in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, 4 vols. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. cxiv-cxx, quotation on p. cxix.

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  80. Burkhardt, The Spirit of System, chap. 5.

  81. Blainville had read Lyell, whose work he declared to be “the only summary which is in the least conformable to the state of the science [of geology]” (Histoire des sciences, III, 405–406). As Flourens pointed out, Blainville nowhere offered a clear summary of his paleontological views. Rather, his doctrine has to be pieced together from scattered statements in his Ostéographie and other post-1830 writings. He does not seem to have advocated a single creation in the 1820s, for there is no hint of it in his Mémoire sur les bélemnites. There, Blainville argued that the order of appearance of belemnites in fossil strata mirrored the serial classification of belemnites. On Blainville's paleontological views, see Histoire des sciences, III, 390–411; Nicard, “Etude sur M. de Blainville,” pp. cvii–cviii, cx, clxxxii–clxxxv; Flourens, “Eloge,” pp. xvi–xxi, xxxvi–xli; and Flouren's review of Blainville's Ostéographie (see note 97 below).

  82. Henri Marie Ducrotayde Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l'organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, ed. F. L. M. Maupied, (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1858), III, 398. Blainville first presented a memoir on the dodo to the Académie des Sciences in 1830. He became interested in the subject, he explained, because he wished to show “that an animal could disappear from the number of beings currently living, in our day, almost under our eyes, without need of any catastrophe other than the thoughtless greed of the human species and his extension into a part of the world to which this bird seemed to be limited” (Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, “Mémoire sur le dodo, autrement dronte [Didus ineptus, L.],” Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Nouvelles Annales, 4 [18350, 1–35, quotation on pp. 1–2). At that time, Blainville left open the possibility that the dodo might still exist.

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  83. Blainville had argued in 1827 that the belemnites filled a lacuna in the series between the cuttlefish and the orthocera. (Mémoire sur les bélemnites, pp. 31, 105.)

  84. Blainville, “Animal,” pp. 24–25.

  85. See note 5. This work, which was left incomplete, was published in installments, each paginated separately.

  86. Blainville, Ostéographie, “De l'ancienneté des primates à la surface de la terre,” pp. 1–68; Nicard, “Etude sur M. de Blainville,” p. cvii; Pierre Flourens, review of Blainville, Ostéographie, in Journal des Savants, 1851, pp. 280–281. On the relation between paleontological data and paleontological theory, see Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976).

  87. Flourens, review of Ostéographie, Journal des Savants, 1851, pp. 123, 275–281. Flourens wrote: “M. Cuvier has devoted a great work to distinguishing between fossil species and living species. M. Blainville has devoted a work no less grand to reducing living species to fossil species. What another great work would have to be done to pronounce between M. de Blainville and M. Cuvier!” (p. 279). In another example, Blainville identified all the variously named fossil bears found in Europe up to this time with the living species. See Académie des Sciences, Comptes Rendus, 12 (1841), 228–233.

  88. In Britain, a number of naturalists had come to accept Lyell's theory of piecemeal creations and gradual extinctions. I wish to thank Dov Ospovat for pointing this out to me.

  89. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville,” in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, 4 vols. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. lxxvii, lxxx, cxi, cxii, clii, clx, clxi; Toby A Appel, “Souleyet,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XII, 550–551; William Coleman, “Gratiolet,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, V, 504–506. Henri Hollard wrote a textbook based on Blainville's doctrine of the animal series that he dedicated to his master: Nouveaux éléments de zoologie, ou étude du règne animal disposé en série et marchant des espèces inférieurs aux supérieurs (Paris: Labé, 1839). See also Hollard's analysis of Blainville's work (note 48 above).

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  90. Flourens, “Eloge,” pp. xvi, xxv, xxxi, xli.

  91. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville,” in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, 4 vols. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), p. civ; Annales Françaises et Etrangères d'Anatomie et de Physiologie, 3 (1839), title page.

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  92. Pol Nicard, “Etude sur la vie et les travaux de M. de Blainville,” in Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Ostéographie, ou description iconographique comparée du squellette et du système dentaire des mammifères recents et fossiles pour servir de base à la zoologie et à la géologie, 4 vols. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1839–1864), pp. cxix-cxx; Bowler, Fossils and Progress, pp. 77–78; Institut de France, Académie des Sciences, Funérailles de M. de Blainville: Discours de M. Constant Prévost (Paris: Didot, 1850); Constant Prévost, “Quelques propositions relatives à l'état originaire et actuel de la masse terrestre, à la formation du sol, aux causes qui ont modifié le relief de sa surface, aux êtres qui l'ont successivement habité,” Académie des Sciences, Comptes Rendus, 31 (1850), 461–469.

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  93. Agassiz, Essay on Classification, pp. 29–34, 214, 220–222.

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  95. Blainville's treatment of the skeleton of mammals, especially the appendices, seems similar to Owen's. See Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London: John Van Voorst, 1848). On Owen's views concerning the classification of marsupials and monotremes, see Dugan, “Marsupials and Monotremes.” From 1833 to 1850 Blainville and Owen carried on a friendly correspondence and exchange of publications. Blainville's letters to Owen are preserved in the Owen Correspondence, British Museum (Natural History), London.

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  96. Dov Ospovat, “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer's Embryology, 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in the Light of Richard Owen's and William B. Carpenter's ‘Palaeontogical Application of “von Baer's Law,”’” J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 10–12.

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  97. Pierre Flourens, review of Blainville, Ostéographie, in Journal des Savants, 1850, pp. 321–333, 415–429, 449–459; 1851, pp. 115–125, 206–217, 273–284. Quotation in the 1851 issue, p. 284.

  98. Anon., review of Flourens, “Eloge,” p. 372.

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    Toby A. Appel

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Appel, T.A. Henri de Blainville and the animal series: A nineteenth-century chain of being. J Hist Biol 13, 291–319 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125745

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