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Histoire des sciences / History of Sciences Alcide d’Orbigny entre Cuvier et La

Histoire des sciences / History of Sciences Alcide d’Orbigny entre Cuvier et Lamarck Goulven Laurent 5, rue Jean-Paul-Sartre, 29200 Brest, France Reçu le 3 novembre 2002 ; accepté le 12 novembre 2002 Rédigé à l’invitation du Comité éditorial Abstract – Alcide d’Orbigny between Cuvier and Lamarck. In the History of Science, Alcide d’Orbigny has the distinctive characteristic to be placed, between Cuvier and Lamarck, who were the two masters of Natural Science for most of the 19th century. It is in this historical context that Alcide d’Orbigny lived. Of Cuvier, he remembered ideas on disasters and species ﬁxedness without using the same evidence, for he was not a vertebrist. Of Lamarck, he rejected the ideas on life continuity and species transformation while using the research ﬁeld opened by the Zoology and Invertebrate Palaeontology founder. Alcide d’Orbigny’s originality was to use Lamarck’s Invertebrate fossils as evidence of the ideas that Cuvier had based on Vertebrate fossils. To cite this article: G. Laurent, C. R. Palevol 1 (2002) 347–358. © 2002 Académie des sciences / Éditions scientiﬁques et médicales Elsevier SAS ﬁxism / catastrophism / transformism / palaeontology Résumé – Dans l’histoire des sciences, Alcide d’Orbigny présente la particularité de se trouver entre les deux maîtres des sciences naturelles que furent, pour une grande partie du XIXe siècle, Cuvier et Lamarck. C’est dans ce contexte historique que se situe Alcide d’Orbigny. De Cuvier il a retenu les idées sur les catastrophes et la ﬁxité des espèces, sans employer les mêmes éléments de preuve, puisqu’il n’était pas vertébriste. De Lamarck, il a rejeté les idées sur la continuité de la vie et la transformation des espèces, tout en exploitant le champ de recherche ouvert par le fondateur de la zoologie et de la paléontologie des Invertébrés. L’originalité d’Alcide d’Orbigny a consisté à utiliser les Invertébrés fossiles de Lamarck comme preuves des idées que Cuvier avait fondées sur les fossiles de Vertébrés. Pour citer cet article : G. Laurent, C. R. Palevol 1 (2002) 347–358. © 2002 Académie des sciences / Éditions scientiﬁques et médicales Elsevier SAS ﬁxisme / catastrophisme / transformisme / paléontologie Abridged version Arriving in Paris in 1824, Alcide d’Orbigny had already chosen: he preferred Cuvier’s ideas to those of Lamarck. On the one hand, there were the catastrophist ideas [22]: the similarity of his language with that of Cuvier is striking [50, 51, 55, 57, 60]; on the other hand, his anti-transformist ideas: Alcide d’Orbigny was as frank and clear as Cuvier about this [61]. Cuvier was considered as the master of Natural Sciences in France during a large part of the 19th century, and Alcide d’Orbigny saw himself as one of Cuvier’s most faithful disciples; thus there is, for a Science Historian, the problem of his isolation. The lack of success of his repeated candidacy for the French Academy of Sciences has been – rightly – considered as a scandal. However, other factors intervened. Contemporary documents show that there were important events during the eight-year absence of Alcide d’Orbigny; ﬁrstly, ideas changed, and then there was the founding of the French Geological Society in 1830. There is absolutely no doubt that Cuvier always had catastrophist followers: Adolphe Brongniart [8], for example. However, reading all the written publications leads us to doubt the domination pretended for Cuvier’s ideas. Élie de Beaumont, in particular, who is considered as the most faithful disciple of Cuvier, disagreed on some ideas of his Master [4]. He even acquired a reputation amongst his colleagues as a non-catastrophist, as testiﬁed by Adolphe d’Archiac [2]. Darwin also wrote: “The old notion of all the inhabitants of the Earth having been swept away by catas- trophes at successive periods is very generally given up, even by those geologists, as Élie de Beaumont, Murchison, Barrande, etc., whose general views would naturally lead them to this conclusion” [26 (chap. X, On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings, Section “On Extinction”). Another major event of this time was the founding of the French Geological Society in 1830. The principal instigators of this were Ami Boué and Constant Prévost, well-known anti-catastrophists. Ami Boué, in particular, refused the catastrophism of Cuvier [12–14]. In 1832, Jules Desnoyers, another founder of the Society, vowed that one of the Adresse e-mail : goulvenn@aol.com (G. Laurent). 347 C. R. Palevol 1 (2002) 347–358 © 2002 Académie des sciences / Éditions scientiﬁques et médicales Elsevier SAS. Tous droits réservés S1631068302000660/FLA “predominant philosophical ideas” that “appeared ready to get the general agreement of geologists” was that of the “continuation of phenomena of most periods of calmness anterior to until our own era” [29]. On the subject of the transformation of species, a member of the Society has left us the on-going discussions, opposing those who believed in the “three following hypotheses, among which one is forced to choose, and which divide those who are interested in this type of questions: (1) where there has been only one period of creation, and the persistence of the primitive species created in their original forms; (2) where there has been only one period of creation with a gradual transmutation of the species from one into another; (3) where there has been successive creations at different periods” [1]. Certains, such as Blainville, supported the ﬁrst hypothesis. Several, including Alcide d’Orbigny, defended the third, that of Cuvier; ﬁnally, others were partisans of the second, which everybody knew to be that of Lamarck. Already before his death (1829), several invertebrists had taken the road he had opened of the link between the ancient and the modern species, ‘proof’ of his transformism. Defrance’s principal work, the Tableau des corps organisés fossiles, 1824, described essentially these species called ‘analogues’ [27]. Girod de Chantrans [37], André de Férussac [30], Constant Prévost [64], de Basterot [3], Bory de Saint- Vincent [11] were expressing similar ideas. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a great admirer of Lamarck [34] stated also that “lost animals were, by an unbroken path of generations and successive modiﬁcations, the ancestors of the animals of the present world” [33]. Author in 1831 of a book devoted to the new geology, Éléments de géologie, which would have seven editions before 1868, Omalius d’Halloy – a former pupil of Cuvier and of Lamarck – conﬁrmed his anticatastrophism ([47]; cf. [48]) and evolutionary convictions: “I consider that the living beings of today come, by means of reproduction, from those of ancient times” [47]. De Boblaye supported that “Lamarck’s bold hypothesis, modiﬁed by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, would acquire a probability that it did not have at the time when Cuvier was challenging it” [10]. Jean-Charles Chenu wrote the same [17], as did Édouard Piette [62, 63]. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805–1861), who was of the same generation as d’Alcide d’Orbigny (1802–1857), tau- ght his students, at the Sorbonne and at the Museum, that they could choose the transformist theory [35]. He showed them the scientiﬁc path to follow, which was to compare actual beings to fossil species: “according to the ﬁliation hypothesis” (defended by him), “present animals come from similar ani- mals who had lived in an earlier geological era” [36]. The historic statement of Camille Dareste, writing at the beginning of 1859, is a conﬁrmation of these tendencies: “Lamarck’s ideas have, little by little, penetrated Science, and today we are starting to understand that the question deserves at least to be refuted other than by jokes or by abhorrence... We see elsewhere today the most eminent of men following the path opened by Lamarck, and making the idea of the limited variability of species the starting point of their scientiﬁc theories” (25, 62). The theoretical position ofAlcide d’Orbigny, lying between Cuvier and Lamarck and their followers, was thus uncom- fortable. The immensity and fecundity of his scientiﬁc works remains no less impressive (a collection of more than 100 000 items; a study of “the enormous number, 24 000 species, contained in 1800 different genus”). Since his death, his importance has been recognised and celebrated, as this Colloquium demonstrates. Lorsque Alcide d’Orbigny arrive à Paris en 1824, dans le but de parfaire sa formation de naturaliste et de s’intégrer au milieu scientiﬁque de la capitale, il n’est pas un inconnu pour les professeurs du Muséum. Son père, Charles-Marie d’Orbigny (1770–1856), l’avait déjà introduit auprès d’eux, et en particulier auprès de Cuvier. Après des études de médecine, et une pratique de quelques années, Charles-Marie d’Orbigny s’était en effet consacré entièrement à des recherches sur la faune marine de la côte atlantique. Son installation à Coué- ron, en Loire-Atlantique, puis à La Rochelle, en Charente-Maritime, lui rendait facile cette prospection. Il s’était fait ainsi connaître du Muséum, et avait obtenu le titre de correspondant de cet établissement. La réputation qu’il avait acquise lui avait fait obtenir pour ses recherches, dès 1821, une gratiﬁcation annuelle de 1200 francs, qui formait, selon lui, « tout (son) revenu ». Les recherches de Charles-Marie d’Orbigny portaient déjà sur les « Céphalopodes microscopiques » [7], les futurs « Foraminifères », qui pouvaient être de nature à attirer l’attention de Cuvier, qui avait uploads/Geographie/alcide-d-x27-orbigny-entre-cuvier-et-lamarck-pdf.pdf