Cuvier’s History of the Natural Sciences: Nineteen Lessons from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Volume 2) (Archives)

Available for the first time in English, Georges Cuvier’s extraordinary History of the Natural Sciences from Its Origin to the Present Day draws on a series of 1829 to 1832 public lectures to provide a detailed chronological survey of the natural sciences spanning more than three millennia. This second of five volumes demonstrates further how Cuvier’s encyclopedic knowledge, incomparable memory, and fluency in many languages in addition to French, made him the ideal person to investigate and interpret firsthand the scientific literature of Europe. Heavily annotated with detailed commentary, the series not only supplies a set of useful references on a vast ancient literature not easily found elsewhere, but also offers new insight into the breadth of this human endeavor and the renowned French naturalist’s concept of the natural sciences, filling an important gap in philosophical thought between the time of Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin.