author
G. (Georges) Pouchet
1833–1894
A 19th-century French naturalist and anatomist, he wrote about human origins and race as well as the anatomy of fishes and whales. His work sits at the crossroads of zoology, anthropology, and the scientific debates of his time.
1 Audiobook
The plurality of the human race
by G. (Georges) Pouchet
About the author
Born in Rouen in 1833, Georges Pouchet was a French naturalist and anatomist, and the son of the naturalist Félix Archimède Pouchet. He became known for work in comparative anatomy and for writing across several branches of natural history.
He specialized especially in the anatomy of fishes and whales, and later served as a professor of comparative anatomy at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. Alongside his zoological research, he also published on anthropology, including work on the then-heated 19th-century debate over the origins and diversity of humankind.
Read today, his books are interesting both for their scientific content and for what they reveal about the questions, assumptions, and methods of his era. He died in 1894.