CUVIER, GEORGES LEOPOLD CHRETIEN FRED ERIC DAGOBERT, BARON ( 1769-183 2 ), French naturalist, was born on Aug. 23, 1769, at Montbeliard. After spending four years at the Academy of Stuttgart, he became tutor in the family of the Comte d'Hericy, who was in the habit of spending the sum mer near Fecamp. There he made the acquaintance of the agri culturist, A. H. Tessier, who secured for him in 1795 the post of assistant to the professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. In 1796 he began to lecture at the Ecole Centrale du Pantheon, and at the opening of the National Insti tute in April, he read his first palaeontological paper, which was subsequently published in 1800 under the title Memoires sur les especes d'elephants vivants et fossiles. In 1798 appeared his first separate work, the Tableau elementaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, which was an abridgment of his course of lectures at the Ecole du Pantheon, and may be regarded as the foundation and first and general statement of his natural classification of the animal kingdom.
In 1799 he succeeded L. J. M. Daubenton as professor of natural history in the College de France, and in the following year he published the Lecons d'anatomie comparee, a classical work, in the production of which he was assisted by A. M. C. Dumeril in the first two volumes, and by G. L. Duvernoy in three later ones. In 1802 Cuvier became titular professor at the Jardin des Plantes; and in the same year he was appointed commissary of the Institute to accompany the inspectors-general of public instruction. In this latter capacity he visited the south of France; but he was in the early part of 1803 chosen perpetual secretary of the National Institute in the department of the physical and natural sciences.
He now devoted himself more especially to three lines of inquiry—one dealing with the structure and classification of the mollusca, the second with the comparative anatomy and sys tematic arrangement of the fishes, and the third with fossil mam mals and reptiles primarily, and secondarily with the osteology of living forms of those groups. The results of Cuvier's principal palaeontological and geographical investigations were ultimately given to the world in his Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupedes (1812, later editions 1821 and 1825) and in Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe 0825). In his Regne animal distribue d'apres son organisation (4 vols. 1817; 2nd ed. 5 vols. 1829-3o) Cuvier embodied the results of the whole of his previous researches on the structure of living and fossil animals. In 1808 Napoleon named him to the council of the Imperial Uni versity, and in this capacity he presided (in the years 1809, 1811 and 1813) over commissions charged to examine the state of the higher educational establishments in the districts beyond the Alps and the Rhine which had been annexed to France, and to report upon their affiliation with the central university. Before the fall of Napoleon (1814) he had been admitted to the council of state, and retained his position under the Bourbons. He was also elected chancellor of the university. In 1819 he was appointed president of the committee of the interior. In 1826 he was made grand officer of the Legion of Honour; and in 1831 he was raised by Louis Philippe to the rank of peer of France, and was subse quently appointed president of the council of state. In the begin ning of 1832 he was nominated to the ministry of the interior, but on May 13 he died in Paris after a brief illness.