Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

Cuvier Day

Swordfish and similar specimens.

Though much of his classification work built off of Lamarck’s categorization, Cuvier was highly skeptical if Lamarck’s theories of evolution and differentiation. Cuvier was personal friends with Geoffroy St. Hilaire (another proponent of gradual changes in species), and though he respected Lamarck as a naturalist, he even wrote in his “Elegy for Lamarck” a fairly flippant refutation that Lamarckian evolution,

“…rested on two arbitrary suppositions; the one, that it is the seminal vapor which organizes the embryo; the other, that efforts and desires may engender organs. A system established on such foundations may amuse the imagination of a poet; a metaphysician may derive from it an entirely new series of systems; but it cannot for a moment bear the examination of anyone who has dissected a hand, a viscus, or even a feather.”