428 NINETEENTH CENTURY. PT. in. 



friends, was born at Etampes in 17.72. It is curious that he 

 also began his education as a priest, and that all these 

 three men should have given up the church for science. 

 Jr St-Hilaire's case it was a passionate love for zoology 

 which led him to persuade his father to let him stop in Paris 

 to study at the Jardin des Plantes, where he was soon 

 oifered a post which gave him an excuse for following his 

 own tastes. He afterwards joined Lamarck at the Muse'e 

 d'Histoire Naturelle in 1793; and in 1795 it was chiefly 

 through his influence that Cuvier was invited to Paris and 

 became their fellow-worker. 



It now remains for us to see what was done by these 

 three remarkable men. For three years they all remained 

 at work in the museum. Cuvier had found in a lumber-room 

 four or five old skeletons collected by Daubenton (see p. 

 204), and he determined to make them the beginning of a 

 museum of comparative anatomy, which afterwards became 

 very famous. St.-Hilaire worked with Cuvier, while Lamarck 

 began the study of those animals such as insects, snails, 

 worms, shell-fish, sea-anemones, and sponges which have 

 no backbone, and to which he first gave the name of ' in- 

 vertebrate animals.' Lamarck's work on these animals is 

 one of the most famous he ever wrote. 



In 1798 Cuvier and St.-Hilaire were both invited by 

 Napoleon I. to go with the French army to Egypt and 

 study the curiosities of natural history which were to be 

 found there. Cuvier declined, but St.-Hilaire went, and 

 spent three years examining the embalmed animals of the 

 Egyptians. He succeeded in 1801 in bringing away a 

 splendid collection of these and other relics from Alexan- 

 dria when the French were forced to give up the town to 

 the English. These collections were conveyed safely to the 

 Museum in Paris in 1802. 



