His Fertile And Curious
Mind, We Cannot Doubt, Would Have Enriched The Scientific Literature Of
France With Many Other Monographs.
The deaths at sea of Bernier and
Deleuze also deprived the records of the expedition of contributions
which they
Would have made on their special lines of research.
Collections of specimens and piles of memoranda, uninformed by the
intelligence of those to whom their meaning is most apparent, are a
barren result.
Peron's biological work was done in accordance with the spirit and
principles of Cuvier, who stood at the head of European savants in his
own field. "Trained for four years in Cuvier's school," wrote the
naturalist, "I had for guide not only his method and his principles, but
manuscript instructions that he had had the goodness to write for me on
my departure from Europe." Cuvier insisted on the importance of structure
and function; "to name well you must know well." The part played by the
creature in its own share of the world, its nervous organisation, its
life as involved in its form, were essentials upon which he laid stress
in his teaching; and he imparted to those who came under his influence a
breadth of view, a feeling for the unity of nature, that is quite modern,
and has governed all the greatest of his successors. "Not only is each
being an organism, the whole universe is one, but many million times more
complicated; and that which the anatomist does for a single animal - for
the microcosm - the naturalist is to do for the macrocosm, for the
universal animal, for the play of this immense aggregation of partial
organisms." Detailed research, coupled with an outlook on the whole realm
of nature - that was the essential principle of Cuvier's science; and it
is because we can recognise in Peron a man who had profitably sat at the
feet of the great master, that his death before he had applied his zeal
to the material collected with so much labour is the more deeply to be
regretted.
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