290 The Study of Animal Life PART iv 



Buffon's patronage. As tutor to Buffon's son, he travels 

 in Europe and visits some of the famous gardens, and we 

 can hardly doubt that BufFon influenced Lamarck in many 

 ways. After much toil as a literary hack and scientific 

 drudge, he is elected to what we would now call a Professor- 

 ship of Invertebrate Zoology, a department at that time 

 chaotic. In 1794 he began his lectures, and each year 

 brought increased order to his classification and museum 

 alike. At the same time, however, he was lifting his anchors 

 from the orthodox moorings, relinquishing his belief in the 

 constancy of species, following (we know not with what 

 consciousness) the current which had already borne Buffon 

 and Erasmus Darwin to evolutionary prospects. In 1802 

 he published Researches on the Organisation of Living 

 Bodies ; in 1809 a Philosophic Zoologique\ from 1816- 

 1822 his Natural History of Invertebrate Animals , a large 

 work in seven volumes, part of which the blind naturalist 

 dictated to his daughter. Busy as he must have been with 

 zoology, his restless intellect found time to speculate it 

 must be confessed to little purpose on chemical, physical, 

 and meteorological subjects. Thus he ran an unsuccessful 

 tilt against Lavoisier's chemistry, and published for ten 

 years annual forecasts of the weather, which seem to have 

 been almost always wrong. Nor did Lamarck add to his 

 reputation by a theory of Hydrogeology, and his scientific 

 friends who were loyal specialists shrugged their shoulders 

 more and more over his intellectual knight-errantry. 



Poverty also clouded his later years, his treasured 

 collections had to be sold for bread, his theories made no 

 headway, his merits were unrecognised. Yet now a La- 

 marckian school is strong in France and in America, and 

 even those who deny his doctrines admit that he was one 

 of the bravest of pioneers. 



Of Lamarck's Philosophic Zoologique, Haeckel says, 

 " This admirable work is the first connected and thoroughly 

 logical exposition of the theory of descent." And again, he 

 says, "To Lamarck will remain the immortal glory of 

 having for the first time established the theory of descent 

 as an independent scientific generalisation of the first order, 



