Science Quote by George Cuvier

Cuvier is laying out a conquest plan, not a curiosity tour: take “fossil bones of land animals” and wire them into “the theory of the earth.” The key word is connections. He’s arguing that bones aren’t just oddities in cabinets; they’re evidence with jurisdiction over geology itself. In the early 1800s, the Earth’s deep history was still being negotiated between Scripture-friendly chronologies, speculative “systems,” and a rising empirical geology. Cuvier’s rhetorical move is to make anatomy the court of appeal.

The subtext is a bid for authority. By insisting on “particular importance,” Cuvier is telling his readers that the most reliable witnesses to planetary history are not landscapes or legends but bodies: teeth, vertebrae, the stubborn geometry of life. It’s an argument that smuggles method into worldview. Comparative anatomy becomes a technology for timekeeping, capable of revealing not only that unknown animals once lived, but that their disappearance signals ruptures in Earth’s past.

This intent also telegraphs his famous catastrophist leanings. If land-animal fossils appear in strata where they “shouldn’t” be, then the planet’s story includes discontinuities dramatic enough to rearrange habitats and erase species. “Why they have…importance” doubles as a warning: fossil bones don’t merely decorate natural history; they force a rewrite of the Earth’s biography, and they do it with the cold precision of a skeleton that cannot be argued into compliance.