Philip de la Vache ""The Canterbury Tales"". However, the reference to Vache in Chaucer's poem may on good grounds also be a pun on his own name. The phrase Vache, leve! in the first line of the Envoy corresponds to medieval French Vache, reïs!, 'cow, leave!'. The French phase reïs, Vache!, (REISVACHE), when reversed, becomes CHAVSIER, the French form of the poet's name (this is a so-called palindrome). In the First Book of Kings in the Old Testament, the cows on their way to Beth Shemesh are likened to holy men, or monks on their way to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Chaucer may have regarded
Le Règne Animal it was paradoxically "the precision of his anatomical descriptions and the importance of his research on fossil bones", showing for instance that mammoths were extinct elephants, that enabled later naturalists including Darwin to argue convincingly that animals had evolved. Le Règne Animal Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) is the most famous work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. It sets out to describe the natural structure of the whole of the animal kingdom based on comparative anatomy, and its natural history. Cuvier divided the animals into four "embranchements" ("Branches", roughly corresponding to phyla), namely vertebrates, molluscs, articulated animals (arthropods