Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire et a l'Anatomie des Mollusques de Cuvier, Georges - 1817

Paris: Deterville, 1817. First collected edition (most memoires previously published in Annales du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle.

1817 LANDMARK TREATISE ON MOLLUSCS BY GEORGES CUVIER, LEADING FRENCH COMPARATIVE ANATOMIST--35 FINE COPPER PLATE ENGRAVED PLATES.

10 inches tall hardcover, recent burgundy cloth binding, gilt title on black leather label to spine, new endpapers, viii, 496 pp, 35 plates. Binding fine, institutional handstamp to half title and title pages, scattered foxing, old water stain to lower corner of some pages, overall good+. Notably, the memoire on the barnacles is inserted between memoires XXI and XXII in the table of contents, but not listed therein. Prior to the publication in 1830 of John Vaughan Thompson's account of the developmental history of cirripedes, which pointed out the similarity of barnacle larvae to those of Crustacea, most naturalists had followed Linnaeus and Cuvier in classifying the cirripedes as molluscs. TEXT IN FRENCH.

GEORGES CUVIER (1769 - 1832) was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier was critical of theories of evolution, in particular those proposed by his contemporaries Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which involved the gradual transmutation of one form into another. At the Paris Museum, Cuvier furthered his studies on the anatomical classification of animals. He believed that classification should be based on how organs collectively function, a concept he called functional integration. Cuvier reinforced the idea of subordinating less vital body parts to more critical organ systems as part of anatomical classification. He included these ideas in his 1817 book, The Animal Kingdom, Cuvier categorized snails, cockles, and cuttlefish into one category he called molluscs, or mollusca, an embranchment. Though he noted how all three of these animals were outwardly different in terms of shell shape and diet, he saw a noticeable pattern pertaining to their overall physical appearance. Cuvier began his intensive studies of molluscs during his time in Normandy—the first time he had ever seen the sea—and his papers on the so-called Mollusca began appearing as early as 1792. However, most of his memoirs on this branch were published in the Annales du museum between 1802 and 1815; they were subsequently collected as Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'anatomie des mollusques, published in one volume at Paris in 1817.