2 Cuvier's Biographical Memoir of M. de Lamarck. 



tions, resembling the enchanted palaces of our old romances, 

 which vanished into air on the destruction of the talisman to 

 which they owed their birth. But the history of these less fa- 

 voured philosophers is not perhaps the least useful. While the 

 former should be unreservedly held up to our admiration, it is 

 equally important that the latter should form the subject of our 

 study. Nature alone produces genius of the first order ; but 

 it is competent to every laborious man to aspire to a rank among 

 those who have done service to science, and that rank will be the 

 more elevated in proportion as he has learned to distinguish by 

 marked examples the objects accessible to his exertions, and the 

 difficulties which may oppose his progress. It is with this view, 

 that, in sketching the life of one of our most celebrated natural- 

 ists, we have conceived it to be our duty, while bestowing the 

 commendation they deserve on the great and useful works which 

 science owes to him, likewise to give prominence to such of his 

 productions in which too great indulgence of a lively imagina- 

 tion has led to results of a more questionable kind, and to indi- 

 cate, as far as we can, the cause, or, if it may be so expressed, 

 the genealogy of his deviations. This is the principle by which 

 we have been guided in all our historical eloges, and, far from 

 thinking that we have been thereby wanting in the respect due to 

 the memory of our associates, we conceive that our homage is 

 rendered purer, just because it is carefully freed from all that 

 was unworthy of them. 



Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, otherwise named 

 the Chevalier de Lamarck, was born at Bazantin, a village in Pi- 

 cardy between Albert and Bapaume,on the 1st August 1744. He 

 was the eleventh child of Pierre de Monet, superior of the place, 

 of an ancient house of Beam, but whose patrimony was quite 

 inadequate to the support of such a numerous offspring. The 

 church, at that period, offered a ready resource, and sometimes 

 a large fortune, to the cadets of noble families, and M. de Monet 

 made an early choice of that destination Tor his son. As a pre- 

 liminary step, he was sent to study under the Jesuits at Amiens ; 

 but the boy's inclination by no means responded to his father's 

 wishes. All that surrounded him spoke another language: for 

 ages his relations had carried arms ; his eldest brother fell in the 

 breach at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoora ; two others were still in 



