route.  A number of works and of elaborate memoirs published since by various naturalists, have shown the prodigious influence which the labours of Cuvier have exercised on the study of geology, of the animal kingdom, and even of fossil botany.  M. Cuvier amused himself during these laborious works by particular researches which would alone have been sufficient to have distinguished any other man, such as his five Memoirs on the Voice of Birds, on Crocodiles, and on numerous subjects of zoology; such also as his descriptions of the living animals in the menagerie, &c.  In all his works, even to the minutest details, we discover the same luminous, clear, and methodical mind, and the sagacity which characterized him.  Feeling the want of a work which should present a general view of his ideas on zoological classification, he published in 1817 his work entitled Le Regne Animal distribue d’apres son Organisation, in 4 vols, 8vo. which speedily became the text-book of all zoological students.  When employed on this work he felt how far in arrear of the other branches of zoology was that which respects the class of fish, and saw how much difficulty had accumulated in it, as well from our ignorance of the anatomy of these animals, and the impossibility of determining with precision the laws of their comparative organization, as from the want of large collections, and perhaps also from the too artificial spirit which had hitherto prevailed in ichthyology.  He employed his influence to form a collection in the Paris Museum of specimens of fish from all parts of the world, and was so successful in his endeavours that the number of specimens which at first scarcely amounted to 1,000, in a few years amounted to 6,000.  Of these he dissected a large portion with a care hitherto unknown, having the advantage of an able associate in the study of the details in M. Valenciennes; he was thus enabled in a period of time that may be called short, looking to the extent of the results, to collect the materials of his great Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, of which eight volumes have appeared, with their appropriate plates, and for the continuation of which we have to look to his laborious assistant.  The recent embarrassment among the Paris publishers having occasioned a stoppage in the progress of this work, M. Cuvier availed himself of this (as the part prepared for the press was already in advance of the printer) to make preparations for republishing his Lecons d’Anotomie Comparee, of which a second edition had been long anxiously called for.  This design, however, he was not permitted to complete; but it is to be hoped that we shall not be long deprived of the edition he had contemplated, and that it will be accompanied with those beautiful and accurate plates on which he had bestowed so much pains, and in the execution of which he himself excelled; for he was a skilful draftsman, and seized external forms with rapidity and accuracy, and possessed the