In 1802 Lamarck was a rising star among these students even if his fellow professors ignored or dismissed his speculations. If reading Buffon’s Natural History or Epochs of Nature had brought them to the Jardin to study nature, they found in Lamarck’s books and in parts of his lectures on invertebrates similarly gripping ideas, and sensational descriptions of nature’s processes working across unimaginable tracts of time and space. Many of those sixty-four students sitting in the auditorium during Lamarck’s lecture in 1800 or those who read Researches after 1802 or Zoological Philosophy (Philosophie zoologique) after 1809 would later return to their work in the provincial hospitals or museums of France and across Europe; others went to sea on expeditions or as sailors in the French navy, as did Fréminville, and they took Lamarck’s metamorphosing birds and astonishing time scales with them, scattering them into further conversations at provincial dinner tables. Following Lamarck, they claimed that the first life-forms on the earth had been infusorian or wormlike organisms; from these, over immense periods of time, nature had successively developed all other life-forms, all the way to the most complex animals walking the earth. The environment—changing temperatures, rising water levels, scarcity of food or water, or the spread of predators—caused animals to adopt new habits to survive. These new habits led infinitely slowly to the appearance of new structures through the inheritance of acquired characteristics: longer limbs for running, longer tongues for catching food, flat-topped teeth for chewing; other structures, if no longer needed or used, would gradually atrophy. It was a distinctive, simple, and radically new way of seeing the world. It was also, of course, deeply heretical to anyone of a religious disposition.
The idea of species change—whether it was called descent with modification, transformism, transmutation, or the development theory—could be heard discussed in the coffee shops, libraries, universities, and workingmen’s clubs of Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Lamarck was now its most brilliant and articulate spokesman.
By 1798, when he left for Egypt, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had been professor of vertebrates at the Jardin for five years. Like many serious young men who had been training for the priesthood, he had transferred his studies from theology to medicine after the Revolution. Discovering that he preferred mineralogy to medicine, he took lessons from a professor of mineralogy at the Collège of Navarre, René-Just Haüy, who was also a practicing Catholic priest. When Haüy was arrested and thrown into prison with several other priests during the street hunts of the Terror, Geoffroy, despite his revolutionary sympathies, disguised himself, borrowed a ladder, and tried to rescue his professor in the dead of night, resorting finally to alerting the professors at the Jardin, who secured his release. Terrified for his own safety, Geoffroy then fled Paris and returned to his parents’ home in the provinces, where he collapsed with a “nervous fever” that kept him in bed for months. There were rewards for such reckless loyalty. On his return to Paris, Haüy recommended his “young liberator” for a vacancy as a keeper in the Jardin’s cabinet and as assistant to the elderly professor of mineralogy Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Eighteen months later, when the Jardin was transformed into the Museum of Natural History, Geoffroy found himself promoted to professor of zoology, a subject about which he knew very little.
After months spent arranging, assembling, identifying, and labeling hundreds of skeleton specimens in the new museum arriving from collections across Europe every day, Geoffroy was struck by the fact that so many of the animal skeletons he assembled—birds, lizards, apes, dolphins—seemed to be structured along the same architectural principles. He was twenty-four years old when he first articulated his big idea. “It seems that nature is confined within certain limits,” he wrote, “and has formed living beings with only one single plan, essentially the same in principle, but that she has produced variation in a thousand ways in all her accessory parts.”
In 1798, when Napoleon set sail to conquer Egypt in order to establish a base in the East and to disrupt British trade with India, Geoffroy volunteered to join the community of 167 of the most promising and prominent men in the French sciences whom Napoleon took with him to study Egypt’s history, culture, zoology, and landscape. Luck turned against the savants from the start. The ship carrying their equipment—scalpels, microscopes, tweezers, jars, pins—sank, and they had to wait for new supplies. Once Napoleon had taken Alexandria, the entourage of scientists followed the soldiers down the course of the Nile, where they had their first views of the pyramids, and into Cairo, where they requisitioned the harem quarters of a mansion recently built and then abandoned by a wealthy Mameluk and his retinue. French engineers, zoologists, archaeologists, and astronomers set up a study center there, holding meetings and reading papers in airy, marbled, and pillared rooms while Napoleon and his army of twenty-five thousand men fought for control of the country. In 1799, when Napoleon deserted his army and returned to Paris to orchestrate a coup d’état, handing over command of Egypt to General Kléber, the situation in Cairo became increasingly precarious.
Geoffroy was overwhelmed by what he found in Egypt: birds, reptiles, and insects; fish and other aquatic animals that Europeans had no name for; images of ibises, dogs, beetles, monkeys, cats, and scorpions engraved deep into sacred temples and tombs crumbling in the desert. There were lion-headed, crocodile-headed, and bird-headed gods. Hieroglyphs everywhere. For Geoffroy, as for Maillet before him, in this landscape etched with signs of immensely ancient civilizations, time began to change its contours. What relation, he wondered, did these ancient tomb-carved animals, seemingly united by a common structural plan, bear to modern species?
Within a year the naturalists on the expedition had established a printing press, a zoo, workshops, and laboratories in the garden of the Mameluk palace in which they lived and worked. With all the beauty and diversity around them, it was impossible not to roam from subject to subject; in fact, they needed to do so in order to make sense of the scale of the new ideas and knowledge. They worked together in new intellectual collaborations, sharing skills and methodologies, giving and reading scientific papers to one another.
Collecting specimens was difficult and skilled work. Geoffroy recruited local people—fishermen, hunters, snake charmers—to bring him new species of animals from the deserts and market stalls of the fishing villages. In the cool hours of the morning and evening, he and his assistants dissected, preserved, stuffed, and classified the thousands of creatures that were brought to the harem rooms in the palace. He and the twenty-one-year-old botanist Marie Jules César Savigny made three expeditions to the Nile delta, Upper Egypt, and the Red Sea, where they found a new species of mongoose as well as hares, bats, foxes, rats, and hedgehogs. They sailed down the Nile to the delta town of Damietta and found the sea and the marshes alive with nesting, feeding, breeding, and migrating birds. “I have never seen such water birds,” Savigny wrote. “Flamingoes, cormorants, ducks … at night one can’t hear anything but the calls of all these birds. Serene temperatures. Soft air. I have never seen so many water birds and so many species. The water’s surface is rippling with wings.”
On a trip to the ruins of Memphis, which Benoît de Maillet had discovered a century earlier, local guides took Savigny and Geoffroy by rope down into the Well of Birds, where they were shown hundreds of pots of mummified ibises stacked up along the walls of subterranean cellars. At the Red Sea they paid the local divers to collect starfish, corals, sea urchins, and crustaceans for them. Within a year the Mameluk palace was piled high with boxes of labeled specimens, bones, jars of preserved sea creatures, and mummies of cattle, cats, crocodiles, and birds.
Geoffroy fell sick with a nervous illness: he grew thin and was unable to eat; he suffered fevers and skin eruptions and several bouts of ophthalmia that blinded him for weeks at a time. But he did not stop collecting. He could not sleep. The theory he had formed in Paris had become a kind of mania to him. Convinced that he could see a basic body plan under all this diversity of
hair, skin, color, texture, and shape, he set out to compare the fish of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and to describe all the fish of the Nile.
In the workshop in the garden of the Mameluk palace, Geoffroy and his assistants sorted through and preserved in wine spirits the fish brought to them every day by the fishermen and traders who worked the riverbanks: sharks, rays, puffer fish, lungfish, fish of every color and shape. The day after Napoleon abandoned Cairo, leaving it in the hands of General Kléber, Geoffroy wrote to Cuvier to describe a new species of freshwater fish he had found, hétérebranche, a previously unknown species of lungfish with multiple dorsal fins, and another he called the Silurus anguillaris that when opened up proved to have bronchioles closely resembling—indeed, almost identical to—the structure of the human lung and three hearts that resembled those of a cuttlefish. This was a revelation for the young zoologist. It was proof of the theory he had begun to explore back in Paris—that all animals were built to a common plan. He wrote in jest to Cuvier that he would now “demand no less than the throne of anatomy.” But his fluctuating moods and enthusiasms troubled him, too. “I am so overwhelmed with business,” he wrote to Cuvier, “I do not know what I am doing or saying.”
By 1799, Geoffroy’s companions were concerned about his agitated state of mind, but then everybody had become a little high-strung in Egypt, especially after August 1799, when Napoleon had abandoned them and returned to France. The soldiers of the French army were hungry, unpaid, and dangerous; they accused the savants of hoarding looted treasure. The Turks were confronting the French troops in violent clashes. The British were anchored off the coast. Their lives were in danger.
But in this atmosphere of political volatility, Geoffroy’s mania for zoological discovery seemed only to increase. He proposed a series of experiments with six hundred fertilized eggs and an incubator; he began speculating on the nature of dreams and sleepwalking. But he also longed for Paris. In November 1800, he wrote to Cuvier to beg him to do everything he could to secure his return to the Jardin. That winter, the same year that Lamarck presented his first transformist ideas at the Jardin, Geoffroy gave an extraordinary number of papers to his fellow savants as they waited to be evacuated from Egypt: papers on the coexistence of male and female germs in all animals; on the formation of the egg; on the organs of respiration; on the sepulchres in the tombs at Memphis; on the crocodile of the Nile; and on the animals known to the ancient Egyptians. He was also dissecting two more new species of fish. “The bombing, the fires, the ambushes, and the plaintive cries of the victims,” he wrote, all paled before “my problems of natural philosophy.”
Back in Paris, Cuvier worried about Geoffroy and the direction his work was taking out in Egypt. Despite the new commitment in the work of the Jardin to facts and verifiability and the rejection of Buffon-like castles in the air, Geoffroy, like Lamarck, it seemed, was also allowing himself to be seduced by abstract, unprovable systems. It must have been the heat, Cuvier told himself, congratulating himself on his decision to stay in Paris and consolidate his networks and connections, turning back to the solid facts and details that thrilled and sustained him. In the three years that Geoffroy had been in Egypt, Cuvier had been appointed to an additional post at the Collège de France, had published two volumes of Lessons on Comparative Anatomy (Leçons d’anatomie comparée), and had risen to a high rank in the administration of public education. He was making headway not just in France but across Europe, convincing people that comparative anatomy, the close and systematic study of animal structures and internal characteristics, a branch of science that was becoming synonymous with his own name, was the key to deciphering nature’s laws. Geoffrey’s fevered declarations of yet another new theory or system must have filled him with dread.
Still, Cuvier told his assistants, Geoffroy had done France a great service. When the triumphant British generals had tried to get the savants to hand over all their natural history collections and notes, Geoffroy had told them that he would burn them all rather than relinquish them to the enemy; the British generals, convinced that this wild-eyed Frenchman might be capable of anything, relented, confiscating only the extraordinary Rosetta Stone.* French science, Cuvier knew, would be forever in Geoffroy’s debt for that act of defiance.
On his departure from Egypt in September 1801, Geoffroy wrote to tell Cuvier that he would soon send him the manuscript of a “very vast theory” that would revolutionize science. “I hope,” he added, “to re-enter France worthy of you and my illustrious colleagues.” But as the tired savants sailed from Egypt to Marseilles, where they were stuck for weeks in tedious quarantine, the mathematician Joseph Fourier, permanent secretary of the Egyptian Institute, described Geoffroy’s nervous illnesses and crazy babblings; he passed Geoffroy off as a fool and his theories as the ravings of a madman. Geoffroy, now deeply anxious, wrote distraught letters to Cuvier, asking him to protect his reputation and to quell any rumors he heard. He finally arrived back in Paris in late January 1802.
On his return, Geoffroy was unable to convince a single one of his colleagues of the truth of his great theory. He was unable even to get them to listen for very long. Overcome by fear for his career and reputation in an environment that seemed in his absence to have turned away from all large-scale theorizing toward an exclusive obsession with facts, Geoffroy locked his manuscripts and his great theory away. He resolved to avoid controversy, at least for the moment. He unpacked his boxes, unwrapped his specimens, arranged his collections, and kept his ideas to himself.
Everywhere Cuvier went he praised not Geoffroy the philosopher or the theorist, but Geoffroy the collector. All knowledge of nature and nature’s laws would now be advanced, he declared, by the extraordinary collection Geoffroy and his colleagues had brought back to Paris, which included not only hundreds of new living species but also mummified ancient species. Geoffroy’s mummified animals, he declared, would unlock the truth about the supposed transformation of species. If Lamarck continued to propose—preposterously, in Cuvier’s eyes—that birds had evolved their shapes from reaching for leaves or wading in mud or grasping trees, then the mummified ibises, wrapped and embalmed three thousand years earlier, would settle the problem once and for all. They had only to unwrap them.
Students and professors gathered around the musty-scented, cocoon-like gray parcels assembled on the laboratory tables of the Jardin to watch Cuvier free the birds and the other mummified animals from their swaddling cloths. Cuvier was excited. “One cannot master the transports of one’s imagination when one sees again,” he wrote, “conserved down to the slightest bones, least bit of hair, and perfectly recognisable, an animal that had once had priests and altars, two or three thousand years ago in Thebes or in Memphis.”
As Cuvier had predicted, inside the cocoons, the three-thousand-year-old animals looked no different from modern species. On the dissection table, the mummified cat appeared to be just the same as the modern alley cats of Paris. The mummified ibises were no bigger or smaller than the living ibises that waded along the edge of the Nile. There was nothing strange, no extra or missing limbs, shorter necks, or additional fur or feathers. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
Two illustrations used by Cuvier to illustrate his claim that the mummified remains of the ibis of Egypt (left) were identical to the modern bird (right).
Georges Cuvier, “Ibis des Anciens Égyptiens” (1804)
This was a good autumn for Cuvier. He had publicly challenged Lamarck’s ideas about species transformation without embroiling himself in controversy or debate; he had made sure that the official report on the mummies, written by himself, was signed not only by his colleague Lacépède but also by Lamarck himself; and, a month after the report was published, he was finally appointed to a vacant professorship in the Jardin. He even managed to persuade his colleagues to change his title from professor of animal anatomy to professor of comparative anatomy. It was a small change but an important one.
Lamarck stayed quiet at f
irst, telling his daughters and students in private that Cuvier’s victory was a hollow one. Of course, he declared to a larger audience in his introductory discourse of 1803, the birds and cats had not transformed their shape. The climate of Egypt had remained stable for the last three thousand years, so they had had no need for change. It took much longer scales of time than that to effect biological change. Three thousand years was nothing in the age of the earth, Lamarck declared.
In 1803 all three men returned to their books, collections, research projects, and lectures. Geoffroy, now curator of mammals and bird collections and determined to keep out of trouble in order to further his career, began to prepare a catalog of the collection. It would be his first book, worthy and uncontroversial. Yet the whole classifying project still remained a contradiction for him. He was a philosopher, not a classifier, he complained; “true science should be sought on a broader and higher plane.” He struggled. He fell ill again. Then he abandoned the whole project. Publishing papers about the new species he had found gave him pleasure, but he repeatedly failed to gain a seat at the National Institute of the Sciences and the Arts, the prestigious learned society founded in 1795 to group together the various academies. A new vacancy came up in 1803; Geoffroy, now engaged to be married, begged Cuvier to intervene on his behalf, but the position went to a physician of no great status who had higher-ranking and more influential friends.
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