Fragment d’anatomie comparée sur les organes de la génération de l’ornithorynque et de l’échidné.

[Strasbourg : Société des Sciences Naturelles, 1832?]. Quarto (260 x 200 mm), disbound from a sammelband but preserving the original plain wrappers (resultant paper loss to spine), upper wrapper with early manuscript title in ink; pp. 10, with an engraved plate at rear; the first page has a stamp, dated 1832, which indicates proceeds from the sale of the offprint were to go towards the subscription fund for a monument in honour of Baron G. Cuvier; some light foxing to the outermost leaves, otherwise very good.

A short illustrated study by the French naturalist Georges Louis DuVernoy (1777-1805) on the comparative anatomy of the reproductive organs of the platypus and echidna. Originally published in the Mémoires de la Société des Sciences Naturelles de Strasbourg, 1830 (Tome 1), this is a rare offprint issued a year or so later.

OCLC locates only two copies (both in France). No copies traced in Australian collections.

DuVernoy assisted Baron Cuvier (to whom he was related) in editing his great treatise on comparative anatomy, preparing the last three volumes for publication, which covered the reproductive, respiratory, circulatory, and secretory organs. For the next two decades he worked as a medical practitioner, publishing little apart from a number of papers on palaeontology; but in 1827 he was elected professor of natural history at Strasburg, and over the next ten years he published widely on anatomical subjects. After Cuvier’s death in May, 1832 he arranged his mentor’s papers for publication. In 1837 he was elected professor of natural history in the Collège de France, and in 1850 was appointed to the chair of comparative anatomy.

Following the publication of the first studies on the platypus by Shaw (1799) and Blumenbach (1800), the determination of the true taxonomy of the platypus was a question which was to vex scientists throughout most of the nineteenth century. It would not be until 1884 that the riddle of the animal’s mode of reproduction was finally solved, when William Caldwell, a Darwinian evolutionist, established that both the platypus and the echidna are teatless, egg laying mammals which suckle their young – the evolutionary link between reptiles and mammals