46 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
indeed, the opportunity of making a new present to 
my country. 
“Since my return to France I have worked on the 
completion of my great botanical enterprises, and in- 
deed for about ten years past my works have obliged 
me to keep in constant activity a great number of 
artists, such as draughtsmen, engravers, and printers. 
But these important works that I have begun, and 
have in a well-advanced state, have been in spite of 
all my efforts suspended and practically abandoned 
for the last ten years. The loss of my pension from 
the Academy of Sciences and the enormous increase 
in the price of articles of subsistence have placed me, 
with my numerous family, in a state of distress which 
leaves me neither the time nor the freedom from 
care to cultivate science in a fruitful way.” 
Lamarck’s collection of shells, the accumulation of 
nearly thirty years,* was purchased by the govern- 
ment at the price of five thousand livres. This sum 
was used by him to balance the price of a national 
estate for which he had contracted by virtue of the 
law of 28 ventose de l’an IV.t This little estate, 
which was the old domain of Beauregard, was a 
modest farm-house or country-house at Héricourt- 
* In the ‘‘ avertissement ” to his Systeme des Animaux sans Ver- 
tébres (1801), after stating that he had at his disposition the magnifi- 
cent collection of invertebrate animals of the museum, he refers to his 
private collection as follows: ‘*‘Et une autre assez riche que j’ai 
formée moi-méme par prés de trente années de recherches,” p. vii. 
Afterwards he formed another collection of shells named according 
to his system, and containing a part of the types described in his 
flistoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertébres and in his minor arti- 
cles. This collection the government did not acquire, and it is now in 
the museum at Geneva. The Paris museum, however, possesses a 
good many of the Lamarckian types, which are on exhibition (Perrier, 
IE Cry (0s 20) 
+ Lettre du Ministre des Finances (de Ramel) au Ministre de 0 In- 
lérieurA(TS pr. an Vi). poee kerrien: lc). p20: 
