“Attacked on all sides,” says his friend and colleague, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, “injured likewise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indignant to answer these cutting epigrams, submitted to the indignity with a sorrowful patience.... Lamarck lived a long while poor, blind, and forsaken, but not by me; I shall ever love and venerate him.” Another writer of that period exclaims, “Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors of their time.” As to Cuvier, the one stain on his career is his unworthy attitude toward his celebrated opponent and fellow worker. Lamarck had, with his usual generosity, aided and favored him when he first came to the Museum of Natural History at Paris, allowing him to hold, in addition to his own chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the chair of Molluscs, which was in Lamarck’s special field, where he had no equal, and which was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with great politeness and without mentioning his name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmonize science with the orthodox theology of his day by means of that theory of “cataclysms” which in spite of its being strenuously defended by so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories.
When Lamarck died, Cuvier as his most notable contemporary was called upon to pronounce his eulogy. What a miserable and unworthy performance it was! Even after death, religious antipathy--that ever-flowing fountain of meanness--survived in Cuvier’s breast, and De Blainville records that “the Academy did not even allow it to be printed in the form in which it was pronounced,” and it is said that portions of it had to be omitted as unfit for publication. Haeckel, speaking of Lamarck’s great book, “Zoological Philosophy,” complains that “Cuvier, Lamarck’s greatest opponent, in his ‘Report on the Progress of Natural Science,’ in which the most unimportant anatomical investigations are enumerated, does not devote a single word to this work, which forms an epoch in science.”
But history has reversed the scales and posterity has repaired the wrong. That theory of biological evolution, which was despised and rejected by the builders of his day has become the corner-stone of modern knowledge, while Cuvier’s fantastic “Theory of the Earth” has gone to the museum of curiosities.