“The famous 1830 confrontation between Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Hilaire, at the French Academy of Sciences, was in effect a collision between Hilaire’s ‘coldly deterministic views (see: chilling effect) of animal form and evolution and Cuvier’s ‘extreme views’ that animals were broken into discrete ‘divisions’.”

“It is quite certain that there was a moment when life did not exist on our planet, and another moment when it appeared. It is the passage between these two states that forms the great problem of natural philosophy today.”

“Can the organization of vertebrated animals be referred to one uniform type?”

— Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1818), Anatomical Philosophy (Ѻ)

“The external world is all-powerful in alteration of the form of organized bodies.. . these [modifications] are inherited, and they influence all the rest of the organization of the animal, because if these modifications lead to injurious effects, the animals which exhibit them perish and are replaced by others of a somewhat different form, a form changed so as to be adapted to the new environment.”

— Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (c.1830) (Ѻ)

“Of the two theories on the development of organs, one supposes the preexistence of the germs and their indefinite nesting; the other admits their successive formation and their evolution in the course of ages.”

— Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1833), “Article” [1]

“Influence of the surrounding world changes animal forms..”

— Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1833) (Ѻ)