|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Cuvier Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagobert. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
One day in 1795, a resident of Maastricht, the Dutchman Hoffman, was excavating in the vicinity of the city and found some giant bones. He sketched them and sent the drawings and individual teeth to Cuvier's Paris. Hoffman assumed that these were the remains of a whale skeleton. Some scientists who saw the bones thought they were the remains of a crocodile. And the canon of the city cathedral claimed that it was the skeleton of a saint, the heavenly patron of the city of Maastricht. On this basis, the canon took the find from Hoffman and transferred it, like a shrine, to the cathedral. Cuvier then spoke out against all these judgments. But for the final decision what it is, he considered it necessary to study the entire skeleton. Even before Cuvier, people paid attention to rare finds of fossil animals. Most scientists considered them curiosities, "play of nature", the bones of fabulous giants or ancient saints. Cuvier not only collected a large number of such finds, but also brought them into a system and described them. He developed a scientific method that made it possible to study fossil animals with the same precision with which living animals are studied. He is rightfully considered the founder of paleontology - the science of the fossil remains of organisms that lived on Earth in past eras and have long since died out. Having received a parcel from Maastricht, Cuvier assembled an almost complete skeleton from the bones and made sure that these were the bones of a huge reptile. There were more than 130 vertebrae in the backbone of the animal. The length of the lizard reached fifteen meters, of which more than two meters per head, and about seven meters per tail. Its huge mouth was armed with long sharp teeth, which made it possible to firmly hold the captured prey. This animal was called a mososaurus: "zavros" in Greek - reptile, lizard, and the first part of the word - "mozo" was supposed to remind that the find was made in the Meuse river basin (in French pronunciation - "Meuse"). This mososaurus during its lifetime was a marine predator that attacked fish, mollusks and other animals of the sea. Cuvier drew attention to the fact that, along with the bones of the mososaurus, many remains of sea shells, crustaceans, fossilized corals, bones and teeth of extinct marine fish were found. All these animals once inhabited the waters of the warm sea, which stretched on the site of modern Holland. Thus Cuvier solved a question in which other scientists were helpless. Mososaurus Cuvier studied at the beginning of his scientific career. Subsequently, he more than once had to solve the same mysteries of nature. Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagobert Cuvier was born on August 23, 1769 in the small Alsatian town of Montbéliard. Cuvier's father was an old officer in the French army and lived in retirement. The mother devoted herself entirely to the care of the sickly and frail child, as Cuvier had been in childhood. He struck with early mental development. At the age of four he was already reading; his mother taught him to draw, and Cuvier thoroughly mastered this art. Subsequently, many of the drawings made by him were published in his books and reprinted many times in the books of other authors. Reading became a favorite pastime, and then a passion of Cuvier. His favorite book was Buffon's Natural History; Cuvier constantly redrawn and colored illustrations from it. At school, he studied brilliantly, but was not known as the most well-behaved student. Cuvier was "punished" for joking with the director of the gymnasium: he did not get into the theological school that trained priests. At the age of fifteen, Cuvier entered the Karolinska Academy in Stuttgart, where he chose the Faculty of Cameral Sciences. Here he studied law, finance, hygiene and agriculture. He was still most attracted to the study of animals and plants. Almost all of his comrades were older than him. Among them were several young people interested in biology. Cuvier organized a circle and called it "academy". The members of the circle gathered on Thursdays, read, made reports about what they had read, talked about their own observations, identified the collected insects and plants. Cuvier was elected president of this "academy". For successful reports, he rewarded members of the circle with a medal cut out of cardboard, which depicted a bust of Linnaeus. Four years flew by quickly. Cuvier graduated from the university and returned home. His parents were old, and his father's pension was barely enough to make ends meet. Cuvier learned that Count Erisi was looking for a home tutor for his son. Cuvier traveled to Normandy in 1788, just before the French Revolution. There, in a secluded castle, he spent the most turbulent years in the history of France. The estate of Count Erisi was located on the seashore, and for the first time Cuvier saw real sea animals, familiar to him only from drawings. He dissected these animals and studied the internal structure of fish, crabs, soft-bodied, starfish, and worms. He found with amazement that in the so-called lower forms, in which the scientists of his time assumed a simple structure of the body, there is an intestine with glands, and a heart with blood vessels, and nerve ganglions with nerve trunks extending from them. Cuvier penetrated with his scalpel into a new world in which no one had yet made accurate and careful observations. He described the results of the research in detail in the journal "Zoological Bulletin". Even as a child, his mother instilled in him a love for a strict routine of life, taught him how to use time, work systematically and persistently. These character traits, along with exceptional memory, observation, love for accuracy, played a big role in his scientific activity. Acquainted with the Abbé Tessier, Cuvier, at his request, read a course in botany at the hospital, which he was in charge of. Thanks to the connections of the abbot with Parisian scientists, Cuvier struck up relationships with the most prominent naturalists. When in 1794 the son of Count Erisi entered his twentieth year, Cuvier's service ended, and he again found himself at a crossroads. Parisian scientists invited Cuvier to work in the newly organized Museum of Natural History. In the spring of 1795, Cuvier arrived in Paris. He advanced very quickly and in the same year took the chair of animal anatomy at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1796, Cuvier was appointed a member of the national institute, in 1800 he took the chair of natural history at the College de France. In 1802 he took the chair of comparative anatomy at the Sorbonne. The first scientific works of Cuvier were devoted to entomology. In Paris, studying the rich collections of the museum, Cuvier gradually became convinced that the Linnaean system adopted in science did not strictly correspond to reality. Linnaeus divided the animal world into 6 classes: mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects and worms. Cuvier proposed a different system. He believed that in the animal world there are four types of body structure, completely dissimilar to each other. Animals of one type are dressed in a hard shell, and their body consists of many segments; such are crayfish, insects, centipedes, some worms. Cuvier called such animals "segmented". In another type, the soft body of the animal is enclosed in a hard shell and they have no signs of articulation: snails, octopuses, oysters - Cuvier called these animals "soft-bodied". Animals of the third type have a dissected internal bone skeleton: "vertebral" animals. Animals of the fourth type are built in the same way as a starfish, that is, the parts of their body are located along radii diverging from one center. Cuvier called these animals "radiant". Within each type, Cuvier distinguished classes; some of them coincided with the Linnaean classes. So, for example, the type of vertebrates was divided into classes of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish. Cuvier's system was much better at expressing the actual relationships between groups of animals than Linnaeus's. It soon came into general use among zoologists. Cuvier put his system in the basis of the capital three-volume work "The Animal Kingdom", where the anatomical structure of animals was described in detail. Deep knowledge of animal anatomy allowed Cuvier to restore the appearance of extinct creatures from their preserved bones. Cuvier became convinced that all the organs of an animal are closely connected with each other, that each organ is necessary for the life of the whole organism. Each animal is adapted to the environment in which it lives, finds food, hides from enemies, takes care of its offspring. If this animal is a herbivore, its front teeth are adapted to pluck grass, and its molars are to grind it. Massive teeth grinding grass require large and powerful jaws and corresponding chewing muscles. Therefore, such an animal must have a heavy, large head, and since it has neither sharp claws nor long fangs to fend off a predator, it fights off with its horns. To support a heavy head and horns, a strong neck and large cervical vertebrae with long processes to which muscles are attached are needed. To digest a large amount of low-nutrient grass, a bulky stomach and a long intestine are required, and therefore a large belly is needed, wide ribs are needed. This is how the appearance of a herbivorous mammal looms. "An organism," said Cuvier, "is a coherent whole. Individual parts of it cannot be changed without causing changes in others." Cuvier called this constant connection of organs among themselves the "correlation of the parts of the body." The extent to which Cuvier was imbued with the consciousness of the constant connection of the parts of the animal's body is evident from the following anecdote. One of his students wanted to play a joke on him. He dressed up in the skin of a wild ram, entered Cuvier's bedroom at night and, standing near his bed, shouted in a wild voice: "Cuvier, Cuvier, I'll eat you!" The great naturalist woke up, stretched out his hand, felt for the horns, and, examining the hooves in the semi-darkness, calmly replied: "Hooves, horns - a herbivore; you cannot eat me!" By studying fossils, Cuvier restored the appearance of many extinct animals that lived millions of years ago. He proved that once on the site of Europe there was a warm sea, along which huge predators swam - ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, etc. They, like the mososaurus, were lizards and adapted to life in the sea. Cuvier proved that in those days reptiles dominated the air, but there were no birds yet. Some winged lizards had a wingspan of up to seven meters, others were the size of a sparrow. There were no feathers on the wing of the flying pangolin; it was a leathery membrane stretched between the body of the animal and the very elongated little finger of its forelimb. Cuvier called these fossil dragons pterodactyls, i.e. "finger-winged". Pterodactyls were also predators and hunted fish. They caught them with their mouths armed with recurved teeth. Having studied other fossils, Cuvier became convinced that in the past there was an era with a peculiar animal world in which not a single modern animal existed. All the animals that lived then died out. This fossil fauna of land animals, mainly mammals, was found near Paris in gypsum quarries and in layers of limestone rock - marl. Cuvier discovered and described about forty extinct breeds of large mammals - pachyderms and ruminants. Some of them remotely resembled modern rhinos, tapirs, wild boars; others were quite idiosyncratic. But among them there were no ruminants living in our time - no bulls, no camels, no deer, no giraffes. Continuing his research, Cuvier discovered that fossil faunas are found in the layers of the earth's crust in a certain order. The older layers contain the remains of marine fish and reptiles; in later deposits of the Cretaceous - other reptiles and the first small and rare mammals with a very primitive skull structure; in even later ones - the fauna of ancient mammals and birds. Finally, in deposits preceding modern ones, Cuvier discovered the remains of a mammoth, a cave bear, and a woolly rhinoceros. Thus, the relative sequence and antiquity of strata can be determined from fossil remains, and the relative antiquity of extinct faunas can be determined from strata. This discovery formed the basis of historical geology and stratigraphy - the study of the sequence of strata that make up the earth's crust. Where did the faunas that we now find in the form of fossils disappear to, and where did the new ones come from to replace them? Modern science explains this by the evolutionary development of the animal world. The facts discovered by Cuvier formed the basis of such an explanation. But Cuvier himself did not see the enormous significance of his discoveries. He stood firm on the old point of view of the permanence of species. Cuvier believed that among the fossils there are no transitional forms of animal organisms. (Such forms were discovered only many years after Cuvier's death.) He pointed to the sudden disappearance of faunas and the lack of communication between them. To explain the successive change of fossil animals, Cuvier came up with a special theory of "revolutions" or "catastrophes" in the history of the Earth. He explained these catastrophes as follows: the sea was advancing on land and swallowing up all life, then the sea receded, the seabed became dry land, which was populated by new animals. Where did they come from? Cuvier did not give a clear answer to this. He said that new animals could have migrated from distant places where they lived before. In essence, it was a reactionary theory that tried to reconcile scientific discoveries with the religious doctrine of the immutability and permanence of species. The theory of "catastrophes" dominated science for a long time, and only the evolutionary teaching of Darwin refuted it. Cuvier paved new paths of research in biology and created new areas of knowledge - paleontology and comparative anatomy of animals. Thus the triumph of the evolutionary doctrine was prepared. It appeared in science after Cuvier's death and contrary to his worldview. Cuvier, like everyone else, made mistakes. But it would hardly be fair because of mistakes to forget about his greatest merits. If Cuvier's works are to be impartially evaluated, then their enormous scientific significance should be recognized: he advanced several vast areas of the science of life far ahead. The merits of the scientist were noted at home: he was elected a member of the French Academy, under Louis Philippe he became a peer of France. Cuvier died on May 13, 1832. Author: Samin D.K.
▪ Huygens Christian. Biography
Machine for thinning flowers in gardens
02.05.2024 Advanced Infrared Microscope
02.05.2024 Air trap for insects
01.05.2024
▪ Hunger rejuvenates stem cells ▪ Bacteria that can eat plastic ▪ A swarm of tiny space exploration ships ▪ NCP694 - 1 amp LDO regulator from ONSemi ▪ LPS33HW - water proof pressure sensor
▪ section of the site Medicine. Selection of articles ▪ article Darwin Charles. Biography of a scientist ▪ article Parking Supervisor. Job description ▪ article Light turns on the sound. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering
Comments on the article: Stas Great article, very interesting and informative. I was looking for information on Cuvier and was pleasantly surprised by such a find. You helped me a lot, because. I was able to sort out the biography on the shelves. Of good)
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page