CEEAP Te Reavy, 
PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY AT THE 
MUSEUM 
LAMARCK’S career as a botanist comprised about 
twenty-five years. We now come to the third stage 
of his life—Lamarck the zodlogist and evolutionist. 
He was in his fiftieth year when he assumed the 
duties of his professorship of the zodlogy of the in- 
vertebrate animals; and at a period when many men 
desire rest and freedom from responsibility, with the 
vigor of an intellectual giant Lamarck took upon his 
shoulders new labors in an untrodden field both in 
pure science and philosophic thought. 
It was now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of 
the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in Octo- 
ber until the end of the year, was in the deadliest 
throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, 
placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la 
Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, 
a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now 
stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers 
in the Museum, for sansculottism in its most aggres- 
sive and hideous forms raged not far from the Jardin 
des Plantes, then just on the border of the densest 
part of the Paris of the first Revolution. Lavoisier, 
the founder of modern chemistry, was guillotined 
some months later. The Abbé Haitiy, the founder of 
