Background
Isidore was born on February 16, 1805, Paris, France. He was the son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
France
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Isidore was born on February 16, 1805, Paris, France. He was the son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Isidore wanted to become a mathematician. But his father saw in him the continuator of his work, that is why he devoted himself to the study of natural history and of medicine. He took his degree of doctor of medicine in 1829.
In 1824 Geoffroy joined his father at the National Museum of Natural History as an assistant naturalist. He succeeded his father in 1837 in Paris as professor of comparative anatomy at the Faculty of Sciences and, in 1841, at the National Museum of Natural History. He organized the Faculty of Sciences at Bordeaux in 1838 and served as inspector general of the University of Paris in 1844 but gave them up in 1850, when he was named professor of zoology.
Geoffroy continued his father’s work, which he strengthened and made more exact, although he sometimes dissembled its audacious aspects in the face of the all-powerful opposition of the partisans of Georges Cuvier. Was he a continuator without originality, as his biographers have implied? In truth, his work is too little known for this position to be upheld. His important views on the persistence of infantile characteristics among the primates and on “parallel” evolution appear to be original.
Although the idea of seeking laws governing the formation of monsters was his father’s, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire nonetheless grouped and brought into accord, judiciously and critically, a great number of scattered facts. In 1832 he coined the word teratology, to designate the science of monsters. His work on the description and classification of the mammals, especially of the apes, was original and successful. In 1832, taking up and refining the ideas of Buffon, the full significance of which had perhaps not been grasped, he showed that, in proportion to the entire body, the brain of young apes also possess relatively greater intelligence and adaptability.
Primarily a theorist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire nevertheless took an interest in practical problems. For example, his duties as director of the menagerie of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle led him to experiments on hybridization among mammals and among birds. In 1856 he conducted an active campaign, with hippophagic banquets, to encourage the consumption of horsemeat, neglected until then because of traditional prejudice. Above all, however, he sought to develop the acclimatization of useful animals and founded two organizations which are still active: the Société d’Acclimatation and the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris.
In almost all of his works, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire gave considerable space to the history of sciences. The large volume that he devoted to the life and work of his father remains a model lof biography, although discretion sometimes made him tone down his father’s conceptions concerning evolution. In 1859 he published Résumé des vues sur l’espèce organique, in which he quietly reminded Darwin of his predecessors in France: Buffon, Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire believed that through the persistence of infantile characteristics certain apes possess a large brain and great possibility for adaptation throughout their lives. Long before L. Bolk enunciated his theory of neoteny, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire suggested that the adult human’s large brain and potential for adaptation might likewise represent the persistence of an infantile form. In the same year, refining the notion of a genealogical tree of species, originated by Lamarck, he attempted to establish what he termed a “parallel” classification of beings, in which both the evolution of the phyla and their adaptive convergences are allowed for.
In 1833 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire entered the Academy of Sciences. In 1854 he founded the Zoological Acclimatization Society, of which he also served as president.
Unlike his father, who possessed a vivid and intense imagination, Isidore was rash in both thought and action and was given to making abstruse remarks. Isidore hid his feelings, was cold and reflective and enjoyed precise reasoning and lucid exposition.