PREFACE ai 
The name of Lamarck has been familiar to me 
from my youth up. When a boy, I used to arrange 
my collection of shells by the Lamarckian system, 
which had replaced the old Linnean classification. 
For over thirty years the Lamarckian factors of evo- 
lution have seemed to me to afford the foundation 
on which natural selection rests, to be the primary 
and efficient causes of organic change, and thus to 
account for the origin of variations, which Darwin 
himself assumed as the starting point or basis of his 
selection theory. It is not lessening the value of 
Darwin’s labors, to recognize the originality of La- 
marck’s views, the vigor with which he asserted their 
truth, and the heroic manner in which, against ad- 
verse and contemptuous criticism, to his dying day 
he clung to them. 
During a residence in Paris in the spring and sum- 
mer of 1899, I spent my leisure hours in gathering 
material for this biography. I visited the place of 
his birth—the little hamlet of Bazentin, near Amiens 
—and, thanks to the kindness of the schoolmaster of 
that village, M. Duval, was shown the house where 
Lamarck was born, the records in the old parish 
register at the mazrze of the birth of the father of 
Lamarck and of Lamarck himself. The Jesuit 
Seminary at Amiens was also visited, in order to 
obtain traces of his student life there, though the 
search was unsuccessful. 
My thanks are due to Professor A. Giard of Paris for 
kind assistance in the loan of rare books, for copies 
of his own essays, especially his Legon d’ Ouverture 
des Cours del’ Evolution des Etres organisés, 1888, and 
