It was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material updating the book in accordance with the expansion of knowledge.

As a boy, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) read the Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle from the previous century, as well as Linnaeus and Fabricius.

He soon became a professor of animal anatomy at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, surviving changes of government from revolutionary to Napoleonic to monarchy.

Lamarck claimed that species could transform through the influence of the environment, while Saint-Hilaire argued in 1820 that two of Cuvier's branches, the molluscs and radiata, could be united via various features, while the other two, articulata and vertebrates, similarly had parallels with each other.

Then in 1830, Saint-Hilaire argued that these two groups could themselves be related, implying a single form of life from which all others could have evolved, and that Cuvier's four body plans were not fundamental.

The 448 quarto plates by Christophe Annedouche, Canu, Eugène Giraud, Lagesse, Lebrun, Vittore Pedretti, Plée and Smith illustrated some 6200 animals.

An "easy introduction to the study of the animal kingdom: according to the natural method of Cuvier", together with examination questions on each chapter, was made by Annie Roberts and published in the 1850s by Thomas Varty.

There is then a section heading, in this case "The first order of Reptiles, or The Chelonians", followed by a three-page essay on their zoology, starting with the fact that their hearts have two atria.

The structure then repeats at a lower taxonomic level, with what Cuvier notes is one of Linnaeus's genera, Testudo, the tortoises, with five sub-genera.

It is summed up in a paragraph, Cuvier noting that it is the commonest tortoise in Europe, living in Greece, Italy, Sardinia and (he writes) apparently all round the Mediterranean.

He gives its size—rarely reaching a foot in length; notes that it lives on leaves, fruit, insects and worms; digs a hole in which to pass the winter; mates in spring, and lays 4 or 5 eggs like those of a pigeon.

[1] The zoologist William Swainson, also a Quinarian, added that "no person of such transcendent talents and ingenuity, ever made so little use of his observations towards a natural arrangement as M.

"[21] But the review notes that "the general distribution of the animal kingdom established by M. Cuvier in this work, are founded on a more extensive and minute survey of the organization than had ever before been taken, and many of the most important distinctions among the orders and families are the result of his own researches.

"[21] Writing in the Monthly Review of 1834, the pre-Darwinian evolutionist surgeon Sir William Lawrence commented that "the Regne Animal of Cuvier is, in short, an abridged expression of the entire science.

[23] In The Origin of Species (1859), in a chapter on the difficulties facing the theory, Darwin comments that "The expression of conditions of existence,[b] so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier, is fully embraced by the principle of natural selection."

Taquet further notes that while Cuvier rejected evolution, it was paradoxically "the precision of his anatomical descriptions and the importance of his research on fossil bones", showing for instance that mammoths were extinct elephants, that enabled later naturalists including Darwin to argue convincingly that animals had evolved.