264 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



distinction and was named an officer on the field, for especially gallant 

 conduct at the battle of Fissinghausen in Westphalia. He soon became 

 a lieutenant but an injury inflicted by a brother officer at play obliged 

 him to retire to Paris for surgical aid and to leave the army. He at- 

 tempted to study medicine, served as clerk in a bank and made himself 

 acquainted with botany to which finally he gave his whole attention 

 under Bernard de Jussieu for some ten years, when he published his 

 'Flore Frangaise' which gave him at once a national reputation. 

 Through the influence of Buffon he obtained a post in the Academy of 

 Sciences, and, as companion to Buffon's son, traveled on the continent 

 in Germany, Hungary and Holland, visiting museums and making 

 botanical collections. After his return Buffon's successor appointed 

 him keeper of the herbarium in the Eoyal Botanical Garden with a 

 stipend of 1,000 francs, which was later raised to 1,800 francs. Tn 

 1793 the establishment was reorganized as the Museum of Natural His- 

 tory and in the midst of the revolution, under the new conditions the 

 botanist Lamarck was appointed to a professorship of zoology, in 

 charge of the collection of invertebrate animals, the other zoological 

 professorship, involving the care of the vertebrate collections being 

 assigned to Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, a devoted friend of Lamarck 

 and like him an evolutionist. Lamarck, now fifty years old, married a 

 second time, with six children, received a suite of rooms in the Maison 

 de Buffon attached to the garden, and a salary of 2,868 livres. Here he 

 remained, lectured and worked, until blindness overtook him about 

 1821, when the last volume of the Animaux sans Vertebres prepared 

 from his dictation by his devoted daughter, Cornelie, was presented to 

 the assembly of professors attached to the establishment. He died in 

 the Maison de Buffon, December 28, 1829, and was buried in a tem- 

 porary grave in the cemetery of Mont Parnasse. His bones, mingled 

 with those of a thousand others, lie somewhere in the catacombs of 

 Paris. To the adversities suffered in life was added the delegation by 

 the academy of the preparation of his memorial eloge to Cuvier, his 

 most determined opponent in the ranks of the 'creationists.' While 

 destitute of low malice this memoir, conceived in a spirit of contempt 

 for Lamarck's philosophical theories, has done much to obscure his 

 merits and place him in a false light before posterity. That the 

 present volume may vindicate his reputation and lead to a more im- 

 partial estimate of the work of this truly great naturalist and admirable 

 man, may confidently be predicted; as even those who differ from 

 Lamarck's conception of environmental and dynamic factors in evolu- 

 tion must feel obliged to recognize much in other phases of his philoso- 

 phy which now forms the common property of science, but which 

 Lamarck was among the first to advance and which he maintained 

 steadily, in spite of ridicule and incredulity, to the end of his days. 



