 These conflicts over the “unity of type” underlie the “great debate” that broke out in French life science in the late 1820s between Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier and their respective disciples (Appel 1987). This debate also forms one of the historic encounters between differing conceptions of biology that affected many aspects of nineteenth-century life science. It drew division lines within French, and even British, biology over the relation of organisms to history, and it directly engaged the possibility of species change. This debate also served to focus issues within French life science in a way that significantly affected the later negative French reception of Darwin’s work. This debate eventually was to involve issues of paleontology, comparative anatomy, transformism of species, and the relation of form to function.