GAUDRY, ALBERT. — French naturalist and paleontologist, born at St-Germain-en-Laye on 15 September 1827, died in Paris on 27 September 1908. From 1855 to 1860 he conducted research on fossils in the deposit at Pikermi, near Athens, through which he established his reputation.
A professor at the Museum in Paris, he collected his lectures in the work on the “concatenations” of the animal world, a work that, because of the clarity of its text and the abundance of its illustrations, has remained a classic. He is credited
with having founded historical paleontology and with having given the science of fossils full autonomy.
G. was an evolutionist by inclination and reconciled his position with the results of biology and with the religious sentiment that was very strong in him. Scientifically, he recognized evolutionism as a hypothesis, not as a doctrine, a hypothesis whose deficiencies and gaps he acknowledged. To fill these gaps, he recognized the “direction of the Divine Artist,” who “creates forms” and realizes the various animal types. This “theistic” evolutionism can only be a personal view, because evolutionism as a philosophical doctrine has meaning insofar as it seeks to explain nature by nature. G., however, even in his lectures, had recourse to the Creator to explain the origin of the types, whose number was determinate. Despite this way of viewing things, Boule, his pupil, attributed to G. a certain inclination toward pantheism, a frequent characteristic of the evolutionist mentality.