490 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
grasp, but so little attention paid to facts of the stratigraphic record. (Cuvier even
includes Lyell's hero, James Hutton, among the speculative system builders,
though praising him faintly for proceeding "with more caution.") True scientific
progress now demands a methodological revolt—a scaling down of explanatory
focus from fuzzy and grand theorizing to immediate and palpable observation, a
move from the armchair to the field and museum. Progress also demands the
specific coordination of two empirical sources—stratigraphic succession as
documented by fieldwork, and taxonomic knowledge of organic diversity as
revealed in large museum collections. We may designate the knowledge of causes
as our final goal, but we must proceed by voluminous and coordinated study of the
empirical record:
If, from the want of sufficient evidence, these questions cannot be
satisfactorily answered, how shall we be able to explain the causes of the
presently existing state of our globe ... Naturalists seem to have scarcely
any idea of the propriety of investigating facts before they construct their
systems. The cause of this strange procedure may be discovered by
considering that all geologists hitherto have either been mere cabinet
naturalists, who had themselves hardly paid any attention to the structure of
mountains, or mere mineralogists, who had not studied in sufficient detail
the innumerable diversity of animals, and the almost infinite complexity of
their various parts and organs. The former of these have only constructed
systems; while the latter have made excellent collections of observations,
and have laid the foundations of true geological science, but have been
unable to raise and complete the edifice (1818, pp. 66-67).Cuvier's unwillingness to proceed much beyond immediate data deprives the
Essay of any "grand" conclusion—perhaps for the better. Cuvier never specifies
how the two substantive themes of directionalism and successive catastrophes
might unite to forge a general theory of the earth's behavior. He presents no
proposal, like Elie de Beaumont's of later years, for a general theory of planetary
dynamics. Cuvier's final section includes no general summary, no stirring plea for
ultimate solutions, but only presents some practical suggestions for fruitful
empirical work, accompanied by a list of potential examples. We should now
focus, Cuvier argues, not on the most recent strata (which have been intensely
studied already), and not on the earth's beginnings (which remain too distant and
too different for adequate resolution), but on fossiliferous rocks of intermediate
age—on the gypsum quarries of Aix, the sand-hills of the Apennines, and the
"stinkstone slate of Oeningen." "It appears to me," Cuvier concludes, "that a
consecutive history of such singular deposits would be infinitely more valuable
than so many contradictory conjectures respecting the first origin of the world and
other planets and respecting phenomena which have confessedly no resemblance
whatever to those of the present physical state of the world" (1818, p. 173).
Lyell would not have disagreed with these sentiments; homilies about the
primacy of observation, after all, top the list of clichés in scientific prose. As