A founder of comparative anatomy and giant of nineteenth-century biology, Georges Cuvier began publishing his twenty-two-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons in 1828. Cuvier's history became a landmark survey in the science of fishes, delving back before the Greeks to the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians. As an introduction to this monumental work, his first volume traced the development of the study of fishes as he understood it and outlined the criteria for classification that his own work would follow. This critically important essay--arguably the first attempt at comprehensive marine biology--now appears in a bilingual version (English/French), accompanied by rich annotations and a significant number of historical illustrations.