But in championing the memoir of Meyranx and Laurencet, Geoffroy found himself in direct antagonism with Cuvier, who held that his four "Embranchements" had each a separate and distinct plan of structure. In a paper read to the Academy in February 1830,[95] Cuvier easily demolished the crude comparison of the Cephalopod to the Vertebrate. He gave diagrams of the internal organs of a Cephalopod and of a Vertebrate bent back in the manner indicated by Meyranx and Laurencet, and he showed in detail that the arrangement of the main organs was quite different, that the likeness would have been much greater if the Cephalopod had been likened to a Vertebrate doubled up the other way,[96] but that even then the arrangement of the organs would not be the same. The organs, too, of the Cephalopod are differently constructed. He sums up his criticism by saying:--"I give true and summary expression to all these facts when I say that Cephalopods have several organs in common with Vertebrates, which fulfil in either case similar functions, but that these organs are differently arranged with respect to one another, and often constructed in a different way; that they are in Cephalopods accompanied by several other organs which Vertebrates do not possess, whilst the latter on their side have many organs which Cephalopods lack" (p. 257). Geoffroy could not accept this commonsense view of the matter, but made a fight for his transcendental theories. This was the beginning of the famous controversy between Geoffroy and Cuvier which so excited the interest of Goethe. It was a struggle between "comparative anatomy" and "morphology," between the commonsense teleological view of structure and the abstract, transcendental. Geoffroy brought forward all his theories on the homology of the skeleton of fish with the skeleton of higher Vertebrates, and tried to prove by them his great principle of the unity of plan and composition; Cuvier took Geoffroy's homologies one by one, and showed how very slight was their foundation. Cuvier was on sure ground in insisting upon the observable diversities of structural type, and his vast knowledge enabled him to score a decisive victory.[97] The controversy was not, as we are sometimes told, a controversy between a believer in evolution and an upholder of the fixity of species, although it raised a question upon which evolution theory was to throw some light.