Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: acuteness, by which the science lias been so much benefited, and by which it receives, every year, important acquisitions. CtrviER has terminated his labours on the mollusca by the anatomy of the cuttle-fish tribe, and has published together, in one volume, with thirty-two beautifully engraved plates,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: acuteness, by which the science lias been so much benefited, and by which it receives, every year, important acquisitions. CtrviER has terminated his labours on the mollusca by the anatomy of the cuttle-fish tribe, and has published together, in one volume, with thirty-two beautifully engraved plates, containing a very large number of figures from his own drawings, the whole of his important researches on this department of the animal kingdom. Those who are acquainted with this admirable work; who have appreciated the immense extent and variety of the researches on which it is founded, and the satisfactory clearness and accuracy both of all its details, and of the general conclusions and arrangements founded on them; will be astonished to hear that its author has executed a scries of investigations equally extensive on the vertebral animals, the vermes, the zoophytes, on many insects and Crustacea. He has not published them in the same way; but the preparations are deposited in the cabinet of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, and will be employed ultimately in that great work on comparative anatomy, to which all the previous and apparently finished productions of this philosophical and accomplished zoologist, are regarded by himself merely as a kind of prelude; although any one out of their great number would have raised its author to a distinguished rank in the scientific world. This history and anatomy of the mollusca is not the only claim, which Cuvikr has to our gratitude within the past year. His work on the animal kingdom, in four volumes octavo, exhibits a methodical and philosophical view of the science of zoology: it places before us a subject capable of engaging and satisfying an inquiring mind; not a dry and uninteresting detail of names and fcnus, but...