CH. XXXVIII. DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMALS. 391 



and he determined to make them the beginning of a mu- 

 seum 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.-Hiliare 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 the 

 beautiful collections 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. 



Lamarck on the Development of Animals, 1801. — Mean- 

 while Lamarck published in i8oi a little work on the 

 ' Organization of Living Bodies,' and in it he first suggested 

 that the different animals were not created separately, but 

 had been gradually altered from a few simple living forms, 

 so that, in the course of long ages, there had sprung up an 

 immense variety of species of animals in the world. It must 

 be remembered that Lamarck had chiefly studied plants and 

 the lower animals. We have seen how Goethe showed that 

 all plants are only altered stems and leaves ; and the lower 

 animals, such as jelly-fish, snails, and worms, differ much 

 less firom each other than the higher animals do. There- 

 fore Lamarck was very much struck with the difficulty there 

 was in settling which were distinct forms or species, and 



