418 THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE CHAP. 



cation of which (1778) at the royal press was secured by 

 Buffon's patronage. As tutor to Buffon's son, he travels 

 in Europe and visits some of the famous gardens, and we 

 can hardly doubt that Buff on influenced Lamarck in many 

 ways. After much toil as a literary hack and scientific 

 drudge, he is elected to what we should now call a Pro- 

 fessorship of Invertebrate Zoology, a department at that 

 time chaotic. In 1794 he began his lectures, and each 

 year brought increased order to his classification and 

 museum alike. At the same time, however, he was 

 lifting his anchors from the orthodox moorings, relin- 

 quishing his belief in the constancy of species, following 

 (we know not with what consciousness) the current which 

 had already borne Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to 

 evolutionary prospects. In 1802 he published Researches 

 on the Organisation oj Living Bodies ; in 1809 a Philo- 

 sophic Zoologique ; from 1816-1822 his Natural History 

 of Invertebrate Animals, a large work in seven volumes, 

 part of which the blind naturalist dictated to his daughter. 

 Busy as he must have been with zoology, his restless 

 intellect found time to speculate it must be confessed 

 to little purpose on chemical, physical, and meteoro- 

 logical subjects. Thus he ran an unsuccessful tilt against 

 Lavoisier's chemistry, and published for ten years annual 

 forecasts of the weather, which seem to have been almost 

 always wrong. Nor did Lamarck add to his reputation 

 by a theory of Hydrogeology, and his scientific friends who 

 were loyal specialists shrugged their shoulders more and 

 more over his intellectual knight-errantry. 



Poverty also clouded his later years, his treasured 

 collections had to be sold for bread, his theories made no 

 headway, his merits were unrecognised. Yet now a 

 Lamarckian school is strong in France and in America, 

 and even those who deny his doctrines admit that he was 

 one of the bravest of pioneers. 



Of Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique, Hacckel says : 

 ' This admirable w r ork is the first connected and thor- 

 oughly logical exposition of the theory of descent." 

 And again, he says : To Lamarck will remain the im- 

 mortal glory of having for the first time established the 



