Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire by Hervé Le Guyader, University of Chicago Press, $45/£31.50, ISBN 0226470911 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
FAR from a normal biography, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is mostly a reprint of the arguments about anatomy between Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier in 1830. Saint-Hilaire, a brilliant young man and a Bonapartist, was a member of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. It was there he conceived the idea that all vertebrates had the same basic body plan, and that applied to insects, too. Cuvier, an outstanding scientist, but also a careerist loaded with honours with a reputation for being something of a creep, vigorously opposed this view and the dispute became public.
This was a consequence of the affair of the crocodiles of Caen, fossil remains that revealed four types with markedly different features. To Saint-Hilaire this showed they had developed because of different environments. Cuvier maintained they had existed because of four acts of ...
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