It fell to his lot to bear the brunt in a struggle against heavy odds which lasted many years.
For the man who now took up the warfare, avowedly for science but unconsciously for theology, was the foremost naturalist then living--Cuvier.

His scientific eminence was deserved; the highest honours of his own and other countries were given him, and he bore them worthily.

An Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of the Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural science.

Science throughout the world acknowledged in him its chief contemporary ornament, and to this hour his fame rightly continues.

But there was in him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain theological ways of looking at the universe and certain theological conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said, too, that while his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the greatest, not only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science should receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which had recaptured Europe after the French Revolution, and had made of its enemies its footstool--all these considerations led him to oppose the new theory.