The great naturalist Georges Cuvier died on May 13, 1832 during the same cholera epidemic that carried of Lamarque. Clearly this needed to be written. Pre-Darwinian biology is rad.

I stand awaiting the cortege of a general, but somewhat predictably, my mind dwells instead on a man of science. Cuvier is dead – has been dead for nearly a month – and I find myself unable to bury him. As Lamarque is about to so vividly demonstrate, great men never truly rest in peace.

Lamarque and Cuvier. Lamarck and Cuvier. Curious how these things tie together.

Lamarck was the leading proponent of gradual change over the eons. It would appear that Saint-Hilaire succeeded in corrupting me, for I am drawn to the idea; it agrees with my temperament. And yet, standing here, awaiting the storm, it is hard to deny Cuvier's elegantly brutal logic. The old world is destroyed, and an improved, more complex one rises in its place.

But if the principles of destruction-rebirth are to justify whatever actions we take in the next hours or days, they must imply not mere chronology but instead causation: for a new world to rise, the old one must first be destroyed. Is that truly what I believe? In zoology and politics alike, I hold the idea of steady progress dear, but there is no stagnation in nature, nor the capacity for injustice. Man alone has that privilege. Thus it is man alone who may find himself with the duty to deliberately destroy.

While I doubt Cuvier would support our politics, it would appear that we are his greatest representatives, for what is revolution if not the most perfect form of human catastrophism?

Deep below the mob's restless feet, the geological strata hold the secrets of a thousand lost worlds. If I could dig into this earth, the very stones would tell me the stories of the millennia. Would it a tale of destruction or peaceful succession? Lamarck and Cuvier are a part of that natural history, returned as they are to the soil. Is the answer any clearer to them now? Perhaps I will soon learn, if I am destined to join them today.

I remember, just two years ago, the debate between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire that so fixated the Academy. It pained me that I could not attend, but I read the transcripts over until I practically committed them to memory. When I congratulated Saint-Hilaire on his performance, he smiled and shook my hand, remembering me as the young man who had shown such enthusiasm over the carotid artery a few years previous. I brought the records to one of the ABC's haunts and we furiously argued over their contents for a few evenings. At the time, the debate seemed like a clash of titans so momentous as to physically shake the Earth to its distant core. Point! Rebuttal! Specimens and studies produced! Goethe applauding! Lamarck reaching out from beyond the grave! Put your ear to the ground in India, in Brazil, in China, and hear the aftershocks of each man's words! What, some asked not long after, was the substitution of one king for another, compared to such a pivotal moment in human knowledge?

I wonder if my comrades would even remember the issue today. Such concerns seem so distant now, suspended as we are between the heavens and the grave. How I wish that this world's ills could indeed be cured through an impassioned debate, through just one more well-reasoned study, through another bold expedition to a distant, fossil-rich land – but not now, not yet. Politics must take precedence if we are to engender a world in which science can truly reign.

And yet Cuvier's presence is thick in the air today, and I think his spirit flies with us, watching, waiting. I can only pray that, through whatever happens, we may vindicate his life's work. Mountains and oceans have moved; surely men can as well. We are now agents of the volcano, the earthquake, the tidal wave, the storm. All my life, I have tried to build, but insomuch as that I must now destroy, may the rubble be fertile.

Modern evolutionary biology, of course, unites the truth of both theories while discarding their faulty mechanisms. Whether the metaphor can be exended to that point is up to you.