Shells

This hand-colored engraving is from Georges Cuvier’s Le Regne Animal Distribue d’apres son Organisation or The Animal Kingdom, Distributed According to Its Organization. The prints from this work feature beautiful original hand-coloring, and some of the fish are heightened with silver and gold. The work was published in Paris by Fortin and Masson in 1817-1849. It is the “first truly complete work in the history of comparative anatomy.”

Georges Cuvier was a French naturalist and zoologist and established the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. He is credited with proving that extinction occurred. His name is one of the 72 featured on the Eiffel Tower of French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. “[Cuvier’s} vast communication network, huge world-wide collections, and extensive ichthyological library, made Paris the center of ichthyology and Cuvier the foremost ichthyologist in the world” (T.W. Pietsch in ‘Archives of Nat. Hist, 12, 1’)

Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom was “the most influential exposition of the typological approach to animal classification, representing the greatest body of zoological facts that had yet been assembled; it served as the standard zoological manual for most of Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century.” (Norman 567)