CHAPTER VII. 



THE LIVES OF BUFFON, PENNANT, AND LAMARCK. 



The popular writings of Buflbn, and his life — Pennant's life — 

 Lamarck and his life — The rise of popular natural history, and 

 of exact descriptions and philosophical zoology. 



If natural history had never been studied in an 

 easy manner, and had not the results of those 

 studies been given to educated men desirous of 

 knowing something about animals in popular yet 

 correct works, very few men would have cared to 

 become zoologists. It is the good, easy, popular, 

 but not necessarily jocular book on natural history 

 that, as a rule, excites the attention of the young, 

 and stimulates the youth to obtain further know- 

 ledge. Such books were written at a very interesting 

 time of the world, and just when they were wanted ; 

 and the writer was a very remarkable man — a 

 man born to wealth and station, but who, like many 

 others, preferred hard work and the study of nature 

 to sloth and luxurious idleness, and even to the 

 profession of arms, so much in vogue in the early 

 part of the eighteenth century. 



