Le Règne Animal (lit. 'The Animal Kingdom') is the most famous work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. It sets out to describe the natural structure of the whole of the animal kingdom based on comparative anatomy, and its natural history. Cuvier divided the animals into four embranchements ("Branches", roughly corresponding to phyla), namely vertebrates, molluscs, articulated animals (arthropods and annelids), and zoophytes (cnidaria and other phyla). The work appeared in four octavo volumes in December 1816 (although it has "1817" on the title pages); a second edition in five volumes was brought out in 1829–1830 and a third, written by twelve "disciples" of Cuvier, in 1836–1849. In this classic work, Cuvier presented the results of his life's research into the structure of living and fossil animals. With the exception of the section on insects, in which he was assisted by his friend Pierre André Latreille, the whole of the work was his own. It was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material updating the book in accordance with the expansion of knowledge. It was also translated into German, Italian and other languages, and abridged in versions for children. Le Règne Animal was influential in being widely read, and in presenting accurate descriptions of groups of related animals, such as the living elephants and the extinct mammoths, providing convincing evidence for evolutionary change to readers including Charles Darwin, although Cuvier himself rejected the possibility of evolution.
Context As a boy, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) read the Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle from the previous century, as well as Linnaeus and Fabricius. He was brought to Paris by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795, not long after the French Revolution. He soon became a professor of animal anatomy at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, surviving changes of government from revolutionary to Napoleonic to monarchy. Essentially on his own he created the discipline of vertebrate palaeontology and the accompanying comparative method. He demonstrated that animals had become extinct. In an earlier attempt to improve the classification of animals, Cuvier transferred the concepts of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu's (1748-1836) method of natural classification, which had been presented in 1789 in Genera plantarum, from botany to zoology. In 1795, from a "fixist" perspective (denying the possibility of evolution), Cuvier divided Linnaeus's two unsatisfactory classes ("insects" and "worms") into six classes of "white-blooded animals" or invertebrates: molluscs, crustaceans, insects and worms (differently understood), echinoderms and zoophytes. Cuvier divided the molluscs into three orders: cephalopods, gastropods and acephala. Still not satisfied, he continued to work on animal classification, culminating over twenty years later in the Règne Animal.
For the Règne Animal, using evidence from comparative anatomy and palaeontology—including his own observations—Cuvier divided the animal kingdom into four principal body plans. Taking the central nervous system as an animal's principal organ system which controlled all the other organ systems such as the circulatory and digestive systems, Cuvier distinguished four types of organisation of an animal's body:
I. with a brain and a spinal cord (surrounded by parts of the skeleton) II. with organs linked by nerve fibres III. with two longitudinal, ventral nerve cords linked by a band with two ganglia positioned below the oesophagus IV. with a diffuse nervous system which is not clearly discernible Grouping animals with these body plans resulted in four "embranchements" or branches (vertebrates, molluscs, the articulata that he claimed were natural (arguing that insects and annelid worms were related) and zoophytes (radiata)). This effectively broke with the mediaeval notion of the continuity of the living world in the form of the great chain of being. It also set him in opposition to both Saint-Hilaire and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck claimed that species could transform through the influence of the environment, while Saint-Hilaire argued in 1820 that two of Cuvier's branches, the molluscs and radiata, could be united via various features, while the other two, articulata and vertebrates, similarly had parallels with each other. Then in 1830, Saint-Hilaire argued that these two groups could themselves be related, implying a single form of life from which all others could have evolved, and that Cuvier's four body plans were not fundamental.
Book
Editions
Le Règne Animal distribué d'après son organisation, pour servir de base à l'histoire naturelle des animaux et d'introduction à l'anatomie comparée (1st edition, 4 volumes, 1816) (Volumes I, II and IV by Cuvier; Volume III by Pierre André Latreille) --- (2nd edition, 5 volumes, 1829–1830) --- (3rd edition, 22 volumes, 1836–1849) known as the "Disciples edition" The twelve "disciples" who contributed to the 3rd edition were Jean Victor Audouin (insects), Gerard Paul Deshayes (molluscs), Alcide d'Orbigny (birds), Antoine Louis Dugès (arachnids), Georges Louis Duvernoy (reptiles), Charles Léopold Laurillard (mammals in part), Henri Milne Edwards (crustaceans, annelids, zoophytes, and mammals in part), Francois Desire Roulin (mammals in part), Achille Valenciennes (fishes), Louis Michel François Doyère (insects), Charles Émile Blanchard (insects, zoophytes) and Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (annelids, arachnids etc.). The work was illustrated with tables and plates (at the end of Volume IV) covering only some of the species mentioned. A much larger set of illustrations, said by Cuvier to be "as accurate as they were elegant" was published by the entomologist Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville in his Iconographie du Règne Animal de G. Cuvier, the nine volumes appearing between 1829 and 1844. The 448 quarto plates by Christophe Annedouche, Canu, Eugène Giraud, Lagesse, Lebrun, Vittore Pedretti, Plée and Smith illustrated some 6200 animals.
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