MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 239 



established. Professors had been found for all the 

 chairs save that of Zoology ; but in that time of enthu- 

 siasm, so different from the present, France could find 

 men of war and men of science wherever and whenever 

 she had need of them. Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire 

 was twenty-one years old, and was engaged in the study 

 of mineralogy under Haiiy. Daubenton said to him, 

 * I will undertake the responsibility for your inexperi- 

 ence. I have a father's authority over you. Take this 

 professorship, and let us one day say that you have 

 made zoology a French science.' Geoffroy accepted, 

 and undertook the higher animals. Lakanal knew that 

 a single professor could not suffice for the task of 

 arranging the collections of the entire animal kingdom, 

 and as G'eoffroy was to class the vertebrate animals 

 only, there remained the invertebrata — that is to say, 

 insects, molluscs, worms, zoophytes — in a word, what 

 was then the chaos of the unknown. ' Lamarck,' says 

 M. Michelet, ' accepted the unknown.' He had devoted 

 some attention to the study of shells with Bruguieres, 

 but he had still everything to learn, or I should 

 perhaps say rather, everything to create in that un- 

 explored territory into which Linnaeus had declined to 

 enterj and into which he had thus introduced none of 

 the order he had so well known how to establish among 

 the higher animals. 



" Lamarck began his course of lectures at the museum 

 in 1794, after a year's preparation, and at once esta- 

 blished that great division of animals into vertebrate 

 and invertebrate, which science has ever since recog- 

 nized. 



