Henri de Blainville and the animal series: A nineteenth-century chain of being

Abstract

In 1839, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1 777-1850), professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, began a course in the history of science entitled "The Principles of Zoology Deduced from the Progress of Science from Aristotle to the Present."' A systematist in all he undertook, Blainville chose to organize his course around great men, savants whom he believed to be the "personification of an epoch, of a degree of development of science."2 These included such notables as Aristotle, Galen, Albertus Magnus, Vesalius, Harvey, Buffon, and Linnaeus. But when Blainville arrived at the modem period in France, he did not choose as his "characteristic type" the man who was almost universally regarded as France's greatest naturalist that is, Georges Cuvier. Instead he selected as representative of the era, and the man who had contributed most to the progress of science, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.3 The historian might well wonder: why Lamarck? Why would Blainville, an antievolutionist, have awarded such a distinction to a man who was generally ignored by his contemporaries? In part, Blainville's choice can be attributed to a long-standing animosity to Cuvier, but Blainville also shared with Lamarck certain scientific doctrines and attitudes regarding the pursuit of science. Most significant, Blainville, like Lamarck, believed that all animals could be arranged in a single linear sequence. According to most historians, the ancient doctrine of the chain of being which reached a height of popularity in the mid-eighteenth century was repudiated by the leaders of natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It fell victim to Cuvierian comparative anatomy, the natural system of classification, and rising