ALS and autograph note by scientist Baron Georges Cuvier Sarah Bowdich 1825
CUVIER, Georges (1769-1832) & BOWDICH LEE, Sarah (1791-1856). An autograph letter signed and an autograph note from Cuvier to the naturalist Sarah Bowdich Lee. Paris, 1825 and c.1825-32.
The letter: three pages on a single folded sheet, addressed to "Madame Bowdich" on the final blank. Written in French in a clear brown-black ink. Old folds and creasing, none affecting the principal text; a little show-through from the ink, mounting residue to the centre fold otherwise very good. The memorandum: autograph manuscript in French, one page. Old central fold, light handling, creasing and toning, with minor edgewear; very good.
A letter and a note by Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist and one of the founders of palaeontology and comparative anatomy, both preserved by his close friend, collaborator and eventual biographer Sarah Bowdich Lee.
The first is a substantial autograph letter signed, dated 5 June [1825] addressed to Bowdich as chere amie. Cuvier apologises for having insufficient time to write the long letter he had intended, gives family news, discusses commissions he has undertaken, and mentions the following day's ceremonial entry of Charles X into Paris following his coronation at Reims. The warmth of the correspondence is particularly evident in Cuvier's reluctance to leave Bowdich for two weeks without news.
The second is a working scientific note in Cuvier's hand concerning an unusual fish caught off the coast of Cornwall in 1796. Cuvier records a drawing cited by the naturalist Patrick Russell in his work on the fishes of Vizagapatam, describing the specimen as having "de longs cirres sous le ventre et un panache sur la tete" - long cirri beneath the belly and a plume or crest upon the head. He asks whether the original drawing might be located and a tracing obtained. On the same sheet Sarah, by then remarried and signing S. Lee, provides first-hand provenance: "I certify this to be the writing of Baron Georges Cuvier being a memorandum made expressly for me."
The two manuscripts together provide a record of the relationship between Cuvier and Bowdich. Sarah Wallis married the explorer and naturalist Thomas Edward Bowdich in 1813. The Bowdiches entered Cuvier's circle in Paris in 1819 and spent much of the following four years studying his collections. Sarah developed considerable expertise as a naturalist and scientific illustrator in her own right. After Thomas Bowdich's death in Africa in 1824 she maintained her close relationship with Cuvier, who reportedly treated her almost as a daughter, and she later published his biography, Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (1833).
Cuvier was among the dominant natural scientists of his generation. His demonstration that extinction had genuinely occurred transformed contemporary understanding of the history of life. Although he famously opposed contemporary theories of the transmutation of species, his work on extinction and the succession of fossil faunas provided fundamental evidence with which later evolutionary biology would have to contend. A scarce letter and note between these two close friends.