PREFACE vii 



The name of Lamarck has been familiar to me 

 from my youth up. When a boy, I used to arrange 

 my collection of shells by the Lamarckian system, 

 which had replaced the old Linnean classification. 

 For over thirty years the Lamarckian factors of evo- 

 lution have seemed to me to afford the foundation 

 on which natural selection rests, to be the primary 

 and efficient causes of organic change, and thus to 

 account for the origin of variations, which Darwin 

 himself assumed as the starting point or basis of his 

 selection theory. It is not lessening the value of 

 Darwin's labors, to recognize the originality of La- 

 marck's views, the vigor with which he asserted their 

 truth, and the heroic manner in which, against ad- 

 verse and contemptuous criticism, to his dying day 

 he clung to them. 



During a residence in Paris in the spring and sum- 

 mer of 1899, I spent my leisure hours in gathering 

 material for this biography. I visited the place of 

 his birth — the little hamlet of Bazentin, near Amiens 

 — and, thanks to the kindness of the schoolmaster of 

 that village, M. Duval, was shown the house where 

 Lamarck was born, the records in the old parish 

 register at the mairie of the birth of the father of 

 Lamarck and of Lamarck himself. The Jesuit 

 Seminary at Amiens was also visited, in order to 

 obtain traces of his student life there, though the 

 search was unsuccessful. 



My thanks are due to Professor A. Giard of Paris for 

 kind assistance in the loan of rare books, for copies 

 of his own essays, especially his Legon d'Ouverture 

 des Cours del' Evolution des Mtres organises, 1888, and 



