PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY 35 
The associates of Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 
who had already been connected with the Royal Gar- 
den and Cabinet, were Daubenton, Thouin, Desfon- 
taine, Portal, and Mertrude. The Nestor of the 
faculty was Daubenton, who was born in 1716. He 
was the collaborator of Buffon in the first part of his 
Histoire Naturelle, and the author of treatises on 
the mammals and of papers on the bats and other 
mammals, also on reptiles, together with embryologi- 
cal and anatomical essays. Thouin, the professor of 
horticulture, was the veteran gardener and architect 
of the Jardin des Plantes, and withal a most useful 
man. He was affable, modest, genial, greatly be- 
loved by his students, a man of high character, and 
possessing much executive ability. A street near the 
Jardin was named after him. He was succeeded by 
Bosc. Desfontaine had the chair of botany, but his 
attainments as a botanist were mediocre, and his lec- 
tures were said to have been tame and uninteresting. 
Portal taught human anatomy, while Mertrude lec- 
tured on vertebrate anatomy; his chair was filled by 
Cuvier in 1795. 
Of this group Lamarck was facile princeps, as he 
combined great sagacity and experience as a system- 
atist with rare intellectual and philosophic traits. 
For this reason his fame has perhaps outlasted that 
of his young contemporary, Geoffroy St. Hilaire. 
The necessities of the Museum led to the division 
of the chair of zodlogy, botany being taught by Des- 
fontaine. And now began a new era in the life of 
Lamarck. After twenty-five years spent in botanical 
research he was compelled, as there seemed nothing 
