Animal Hierarchies: Describing and Dissecting at the Paris Academy of Sciences

From the 1660s to the 1680s, natural philosophers at the Paris Academy of Sciences pursued a project to dissect and describe a great number of animals. The physician Claude Perrault quickly took charge after the Academy’s founding in 1666 and organized a research program in anatomy.  He proposed two distinct sets of anatomical subjects, with overlapping objectives. Following current research on the structure and function of the human body, he proposed a series of dissections of human cadavers and dead and live domestic animals including cats, pigs, dogs, and sheep.  He also took advantage of a supply of exotic animals originating in the royal menageries at Vincennes and Versailles and systematically dissected these animals when they died; among the first of these was a lion in 1667.  But a third category of wild European animals were also dissected.  The Academy published lavish volumes describing the exotic animals in great detail.  We know about the local and domestic animals only through the manuscript minutes.  Yet these categories were quite fluid, and often overlapped.  How did the academicians distinguish exotic from native, wild from domestic?  Which had greater value? And where did humans fit into these categories, since one goal of dissection was a better understanding of human form and function?