Cuvier, Frédéric

(b. Montbéliard, Württemberg, 28 June 1773; d. Strasbourg, France, 17 July 1838)

zoology

Frédéric Cuvier, four years younger than his famous brother Georges, proved to be a mediocre student and was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Montbéliard. His brother summoned him to Paris in 1797, to help him arrange the comparative anatomy gallery

at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, For several years Frédéric completed his education by studying applied science and, in 1801, working on the galvanic battery with Biot. Then his brother entrusted him with preparing the catalog of the comparative anatomy collections at the museum. He did a study of the classification of mammals based on their dentition, Des dents de mammifères… (1825)

In 1804, at thirty-one, Cuvier’s brother appointed him head keeper of the museum menagerie, where he remained until his death. From 1818 to 1837 he published seventy installments of his Histoire des mammifères, in which approximately 500 species were described (about 100 were known only slightly); he named important new species and genera, such as Phacochoerus and Spermophilus; and he published Histoire naturelle des cétacés (1838), which has an interesting preface. He was put in charge of the Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles edited by Levrault (1816–1830) and wrote articles for it.

Cuvier’s most original work was his scientific study of the behavior of mammals in captivity. He studied the instinctive activities of the young from birth, and the sexual instinct of adults on the basis of their menses and the seasons. He analyzed the remarkable intelligence apparently diminishes as animals (particularly apes) become adult. With the seal he showed, contrary to the opinion held at that time, that the intelligence of an animal is not a function of the keenness or completeness of its sensory organs.

Cuvier was ahead of his time in the study of mammalian social life. In addition to solitary species, in which individuals do not associate except during the breeding season, he distinguished semipermanent couples, permanent couples, and animals living in groups. Further, he showed that animal groups were hierarchical, with a leader; the young often took their place in the hierarchy only according to the choice made by the females. The individual, once separated from the group, might die or become attached either to an animal of another species or even to man.

Cuvier established an important distinction between the domesticated animal, such as the cat, which accepts our affection but remains solitary by nature, and the truly domestic animal, such as the dog, which social by instinct, participates in the social life of humans. He felt that certain social mammals, such as the daw, the chigetai, the tapir, and the vicuña, could be domesticated. He claimed that when social animals were hunted, the instinct of self-preservation dominated the social instinct and the group dispersed; but as soon as the spicies found a peaceful environment again, the social instinct reappeared. Cuvier was able to show this experimentally by causing the gregarious activities and building techniques of beavers to reappear in captivity or semicaptivity. He hoped that his study of mammalian societies would make possible the understanding of human societies.

Often audacious in his ideas but very modest and gentle, Cuvier had loyal friends. His brother Georges had him appointed inspector of the Academy for Paris (1810), then inspector general of studies (1831); these time-consuming duties were perhaps the cause of his inability to complete his work on the origin of animal behavior. He was elected to be Académie des Sciences in 1826 and to the Royal Society of London; the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle wanted him to have the chair of animal psychology; when this proved too controversial, it created for him, in December 1837, the chair of comparative physiology. Cuvier died six month later, at almost the same age as his brother and from an illness with the same symptoms. The physiologist Pierre Flourens succeeded him at the museum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The core of Cuvier’s work, in terms of periodical articles (50 titles), is listed in the Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, II(1868), 112–114; a list of his other works (14 titles) is in the Catalogue général des livers imprimées de la Bibliothèque Nationale—Auteures, XXXIV(1908), cols 981–983. Of special note is the article “Instinct,” in Levrault, ed., Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, XXIII (1822), 528–544. His books include Des dents de mammifères considérées comme caractèresn zoologiques (Paris, 1825); and, with E. Geoffroy Saint–Hilaire, Histoire natirelle des mammifères… figures originales enluminées (Paris, 1818–1837, 70 installments in folio; supps., 1842),

II. Secondary Literature. Flourens’s éloge of Cuvier, read to the Institue, is in Mémories de I’Académie des sciences, 18 (1842), 1–28; see also Journal des savants (1839), 321–333, 461–479, 513–527, He also wrote De I’instinct et de I’intelligence des animaux. Résumé des observations de Frédéric Cuvier (3rd ed., Paris, 1858). This book, somewhat superficial despite its scope, also deals with Cuvier’s pre decessors in animal psychology.

Franck Bourdier