As a member of the Council of State he took a distinguished lead, which indeed he never failed to do wherever he was placed, and he was eminently useful by his extraordinary talent for the despatch of business. He was a patient listener, and was never forward with his opinion; he allowed the useless talkers to have their course, and, while he appeared indifferent to what was going on, he was often drawing up a resolution, which his colleagues usually adopted without farther discussion, after he had given a short and luminous exposition of his views. For thirteen years previous to his death he was chairman of the Committee of the Council of State, to which the affairs of the interior belong; and the quantity of business which passed through his hands was wonderful. It was accomplished by his great skill in making those useful with whom he acted; by his talent in keeping his colleagues to the point in their discussions; and by his prodigious readiness of memory, which enabled him to go back at once to former decisions where the principle of the question under deliberation had been already settled. His reading in history had been very extensive, and his attention was ever alive to what was passing around him, as well in other countries as in France; so that he brought to bear on the matter in debate, not speculative opinions merely, but maxims drawn from the experience of past and present times. In the Chamber of Deputies, of which he was a member for several years, he took an active part, and often originated measures. His manner as a speaker was very impressive, and the rich stores of his mind, and his ready and natural eloquence commanded attention. At the end of 1831 he was created a peer; and during the short time he sat in the Upper Chamber, he took a prominent part in its business, and drew up some important reports of committees to which he belonged.
But his reputation as a statesman was confined to France: his achievements in science have spread his fame over the civilized world. We can in this place do little more than mention the titles of the most important of Cuvier’s works; even to name all would carry us beyond our limits. His earliest production was a memoir read before the Natural History Society of Paris, in 1795, and published in the Décade Philosophique. In this paper he objects to the divisions of certain of the lower animals adopted by Linnæus, and proposes a more scientific classification of the mollusca, crustacea, worms, insects, and other invertebrate animals. His attention had been long directed to that branch of natural history, and his subsequent researches in the same department, most of which have been communicated to the world through the medium of the ‘Annales du Museum,’ have thrown great light on that obscure and curious part of the creation. Three years afterwards, he published his Elementary View of the Natural History of Animals, which contains an outline of the lectures he delivered at the Pantheon. In this work he displayed the vast extent of his acquaintance with the works of his predecessors, and, at the same time, the originality of his own mind, by introducing a new arrangement of the animal kingdom, founded on more exact investigation and comparison of the varieties which exist in anatomical structure. With the assistance of his friends, Dumeril and Duvernay, he published, in 1802, his ‘Leçons d’Anatomie Comparée,’ in two volumes, octavo, afterwards extended to five. These are singularly lucid and exact, and form the most complete work on the subject which has yet appeared.