Cuvier had studied these old bones as well. Some of the bones came from Siberia, others from North America. These included a three-and-a-half-foot-long femur, a tusk the size of a jousting lance, and several teeth that weighed more than five pounds each.
Over the decades, the museum had acquired a variety of old bones that appeared elephantine. Having successfully sliced the elephant in two, Cuvier continued with his dissection. Looking at live animals would not have revealed this difference, as who would have the temerity to peer at an elephant’s molars? “It is to anatomy alone that zoology owes this interesting discovery,” Cuvier said. The elephant from Ceylon had molars with wavy ridges on the surface, “like festooned ribbons,” while the elephant from the Cape of Good Hope had teeth with ridges arranged in the shape of diamonds. Among the animals’ many distinguishing characteristics were their teeth. “It is clear that the elephant from Ceylon differs more from that of Africa than the horse from the ass or the goat from the sheep,” he declared. Asian and African elephants, he told his audience, represented two distinct species.
Cuvier, in his first few months in Paris, had examined with care the plundered skulls and had reached his own conclusion. Still, elephants were regarded as elephants, much as dogs were dogs, some gentle and others ferocious. (One touring elephant, known as Hansken, was immortalized by Rembrandt.) Europeans knew that there were elephants in Africa, which were considered to be dangerous, and elephants in Asia, which were said to be more docile. Included among the rocks and dried plants were two elephant skulls, one from Ceylon-now Sri Lanka-and the other from the Cape of Good Hope, in present-day South Africa.īy this point, Europe was well acquainted with elephants occasionally one of the animals had been brought to the Continent as a royal gift, or to travel with a fair. Rudwick relates, in “Bursting the Limits of Time” (2005), a hundred and fifty crates’ worth was delivered to the city’s National Museum of Natural History. Booty, in the form of art, jewels, seeds, machinery, and minerals, was streaming into Paris. France was in the midst of the military campaigns that would lead to the Napoleonic Wars, and had recently occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. Although he left behind no record to explain his choice, it’s likely that it had to do with loot. An older colleague later described him as popping up in the city “like a mushroom.”įor his inaugural lecture, Cuvier decided to speak about elephants. Nevertheless, he had managed to secure a prestigious research position there, thanks to the passing of the ancien régime, on the one hand, and his own sublime self-regard, on the other. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on the Swiss border and had almost no connections in the capital. He had wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament that a friend compared to the exterior of the earth-generally cool, but capable of violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror.
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