Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals of the Earth

by Georges Cuvier, Ian C. Johnston (Translator)

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a brilliant, influential, and powerful figure in natural science in the early nineteenth century, particularly famous for his work with the fossils of quadrupeds and his ability to reconstruct entire skeletal structures on the basis of a few fragments. Like many of his colleagues, Cuvier opposed evolution and yet, as a scientist, he could not ignore the evidence of past extinctions. Thus, he proposed that the history of the earth was characterized by a series of major calamities which had wiped out almost all creatures on the earth. The latest of these disasters occurred a few thousand years ago.

The Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals was originally the introduction to an important book on quadruped fossils, but its popularity soon led to its being printed and translated as a separate volume. In it Cuvier sets down an argument for his views on the history the earth, a position that has come to be known as Catastrophism.

However, the Discourse is more than a fascinating picture of the state of natural science in the years before Darwin’s work, for it offers an enormously wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn about the history of human society from mythology, astrology, astronomy, and literature from all of the world’s cultures to which Cuvier had access.

Ian Johnston’s fluent new translation of this landmark in the history of science also includes Cuvier’s essay On the Ibis, in which Cuvier resolves a long dispute about the identity of this ancient bird.

238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 10, 1822

About the author

French zoologist Baron Georges Léopold Cuvier developed influential methods of comparative anatomy and applied them to fossil and living animals.

People knew Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier, a naturalist. Cuvier, an instrumental major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century, established the field of paleontology through his work.

People consider work of Cuvier as the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he grouped classes into phyla and incorporated species into the classification to expanded Linnaean taxonomy. Cuvier also established well known extinction as a fact; many contemporaries at the time considered this merely controversial speculation. In Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), Cuvier proposed that after periodic catastrophic floods, something created new species. In this way, Cuvier most propelled catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century. His study of the strata of the basin of Paris with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy.

Among other accomplishments, Cuvier established that bones, found in the United States of America, belonged to an extinct elephant that he later named as a mastodon, and people dug a large skeleton in Paraguay of Megatherium, a giant, prehistoric sloth. He also named but discovered not the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus and the pterosaur Pterodactylus and first suggested that reptiles, rather than mammals, dominated the earth in prehistoric times.

He authored Le Règne Animal ( The Animal Kingdom ), his most famous work, in 1817. In 1819, people created him a peer in honor of his scientific contributions. Thereafter, people knew him. He died in Paris during an epidemic of cholera.

Louis Agassiz on the continent and in America, and Richard Owen in England followed Cuvier. People inscribed his name and 71 other names on the Eiffel tower.