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''Le Règne Animal'' (The Animal Kingdom) is the most famous work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. It sets out to describe the natural structure of the whole of the animal kingdom based on comparative anatomy, and its natural history. The work appeared in four octavo volumes in 1817; a second edition in five volumes was brought out in 1829–1830 and a third, written by twelve "disciples" of Cuvier, in 1836–1849. In this classic work, Cuvier presented the results of his life's research into the structure of living and fossil animals. With the exception of the section on insects, in which he was assisted by his friend Pierre André Latreille, the whole of the work was his own. It was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material updating the book in accordance with the expansion of knowledge. It was also translated into German, Italian and other languages, and abridged in versions for children. ''Le Règne Animal'' was influential in being widely read, and in presenting accurate descriptions of groups of related animals, such as the living elephants and the extinct mammoths, providing convincing evidence for evolutionary change to readers including Charles Darwin, although Cuvier himself rejected the possibility of evolution. ==Context== As a boy, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) read the Comte de Buffon's ''Histoire Naturelle'' from the previous century, as well as Linnaeus and Fabricius. He was brought to Paris by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795, not long after the French Revolution. He soon became a professor of animal anatomy at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, surviving changes of government from revolutionary to Napoleonic to monarchy. Essentially on his own he created the discipline of vertebrate palaeontology and the accompanying comparative method. He demonstrated that animals had become extinct. In an earlier attempt to improve the classification of animals, Cuvier transferred the concepts of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu's (1748-1836) method of natural classification, which had been presented in 1789 in ''Genera plantarum'', from botany to zoology. In 1795, from a "fixist" perspective (denying the possibility of evolution), Cuvier divided Linnaeus's two unsatisfactory classes ("insects" and "worms") into six classes of "white-blooded animals" or invertebrates: molluscs, crustaceans, insects and worms (differently understood), echinoderms and zoophytes.〔Cuvier, Georges. ''Mémoire sur une nouvelle distribution des animaux à sang blanc'', lu le 21 Floréal de l'an III (10 mai 1795), à la Société d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris.〕 Cuvier divided the molluscs into three orders: cephalopods, gastropods and acephala.〔Georges Cuvier, ''Second Mémoire sur l'organisation et les rapports des animaux à sang blanc'', lu le 11 Prairial de l'an III (30 mai 1795), à la Société d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris.〕 Still not satisfied, he continued to work on animal classification, culminating over twenty years later in the ''Règne Animal''. For the ''Règne Animal'', using evidence from comparative anatomy and palaeontology—including his own observations—Cuvier divided the animal kingdom into four principal body plans. Taking the central nervous system as an animal's principal organ system which controlled all the other organ systems such as the circulatory and digestive systems, Cuvier distinguished four types of organisation of an animal's body:〔De Wit, Hendrik Cornelius Dirk De Wit. ''Histoire du Développement de la Biologie'', Volume III, Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, Lausanne, 1994, p. 94-96. ISBN 2-88074-264-1〕 * I. with a brain and a spinal cord (surrounded by parts of the skeleton) * II. with organs linked by nerve fibres * III. with two longitudinal, ventral nerve cords linked by a band with two ganglia positioned below the oesophagus * IV. with a diffuse nervous system which is not clearly discernible Grouping animals with these body plans resulted in four "embranchements" or branches (vertebrates, molluscs, the articulata that he claimed were natural (arguing that insects and annelid worms were related) and zoophytes (radiata)). This effectively broke with the mediaeval notion of the continuity of the living world in the form of the great chain of being. It also set him in opposition to both Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck: Lamarck claimed that species could transform through the influence of the environment, while Saint-Hilaire argued in 1820 that two of Cuvier's branches, the molluscs and radiata, could be united via various features, while the other two, articulata and vertebrates, similarly had parallels with each other. Then in 1830, Saint-Hilaire argued that these two groups could themselves be related, implying a single form of life from which all others could have evolved, and that Cuvier's four body plans were not fundamental. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Le Règne Animal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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