Note 120 — Chapter XII · LAMARCK THE ZOÖLOGIST

These papers have been mercilessly criticised by Blainville in his “Cuvier et Geoffroy St. Hilaire.” In the second article—i.e., on the anatomy of the limpet—Cuvier, in considering the organs, follows no definite plan; he gives a description “tout-a-fait fantastique” of the muscular fibres of the foot, and among other errors in this first essay on comparative anatomy he mistakes the tongue for the intromittent organ; the salivary glands, and what is probably part of the brain, being regarded as the testes, with other “erreurs matérielles inconcevables, même à l’époque ou elle fut rédigée.” In his first article he mistakes a species of the myriapod genus Glomeris for the isopod genus Armadillo. In this he is corrected by the editor (possibly Lamarck himself), who remarks in a footnote that the forms to which M. Cuvier refers under the name of Armadillo are veritable species of Julus. We have verified these criticisms of Cuvier by reference to his papers in the “Journal.” It is of interest to note, as Blainville does, that Cuvier at this period admits that there is a passage from the Isopoda to the armadilloes and Julus. Cuvier, then twenty-three years old, wrote: “Nous sommes donc descendus par degrès, des Écrevisses aux Squilles, de celles-ci aux Aselles, puis aux Cloportes, aux Armadilles et aux Ïules” (Journal d’Hist. nat., tom. ii., p. 29, 1792). These errors, as regards the limpet, were afterwards corrected by Cuvier (though he does not refer to his original papers) in his Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire et à l’Anatomie des Mollusques (1817).