Author: [Serres, A. É.. R. A.]
Title: Des lois de l'embryogénie ou des règles de formation des animaux et de l'homme.
Description: Paris, Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, [1845]. 4to (31.6 x 24.5 cm). 68 pp., nine lithographed plates. Disbound. = A seldom seen paper on ontology, in particular on embryonic development, by the French naturalist Antoine Étienne Rénaud Auguste Serres (1787-1868), but published anonymously. 'In 1810 Serres received his medical doctorate in Paris, and afterwards worked at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris and the Hôpital de la Pitié. In 1841 he was chosen president of the French Academy of Sciences. From 1850 to 1868 he was chair of comparative anatomy at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. ... With German anatomist, Johann Friedrich Meckel (1781-1833), the supposed "Meckel-Serres Law" is obtained. This was a theory that attempted to provide a link between comparative embryology and a "pattern of unification" in the organic world. It was based on a belief that within the entire animal kingdom there was a single unified body-type, and that during development, the organs of higher animals matched the forms of comparable organs in lower animals. This theory applied to both vertebrates and invertebrates, and also stated that higher animals go through embryological stages analogous to the adult stages of lower life-forms in the course of their development, a version of the recapitulation theory later ossified in the statement "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny of Ernst Haeckel'." (Wikipedia). Disbound from the Muséum's Archives, volume IV. Some scattered, mostly marginal foxing, but generally clean. Text and plate sections separated. Otherwise a very good copy.

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