Gaudry, Albert

GAUDRY, ALBERT. - French naturalist and paleontologist, b. at St-Germain-en-Laye on 15 Sept. 1827, d. in Paris on 27 Sept. 1908. From 1855 to 1860 he conducted research on fossils in the deposit of Pikermi, near Athens, with which he established his fame.

A professor at the Museum in Paris, he gathered his lectures into the work on the "concatenations" of the animal world, a work that, for 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 sentiment and reconciled his position with the results of biology and with the religious sentiment very much alive in him. Scientifically he recognized evolutionism as a hypothesis, not as a doctrine, a hypothesis whose deficiencies and gaps he admitted. And to fill these gaps he recognized the "direction of the Divine Artist" who "creates the forms" and realizes the various animal types. This "theistic" evolutionism can only be a personal vision, because evolutionism as a philosophical doctrine makes sense only insofar as it seeks to explain nature by nature. G., on the other hand, even in his lectures, had recourse to the Creator to explain the origin of the types, determined in number. Despite this way of seeing things, Boule, his pupil, contested in G. a certain inclination to pantheism, a frequent hallmark of the evolutionistic mentality.

Luigi Scremin