Georges Cuvier Quotes

The observer listens to nature: the experimenter questions and forces her to reveal herself.

Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.