Moving to Toulouse, he practised medicine for a short time, and contributed various memoirs to the local Journal de Médecine and to the Annales des sciences naturelles (1834–36).

[1] Elected professor of natural history at the Lycée Napoléon in 1850, he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1852, and in 1855 was appointed to the chair of anthropology and ethnography at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

He was an accurate observer and unwearied collector of zoological materials, gifted with remarkable descriptive power, and possessed of a clear, vigorous style, but somewhat deficient in deep philosophic insight.

Hence his serious studies on the anatomical characters of the lower and higher organisms, man included, will retain their value, while many of his theories and generalizations, especially in the department of ethnology, were already forgotten by the end of the century.

Of his numerous essays in scientific periodicals, the more important were: Then there is the vast series issued under the general title of Etudes sur les types inférieurs de l'embranchement des annelés, and the results of several scientific expeditions to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlands, Italy and Sicily, forming a series of articles in the Revue des deux mondes, or embodied in the Souvenirs d'un naturaliste (2 vols., 1854).