CHAPTER IV 



PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY AT THE 



MUSEUM 



Lamarck's career as a botanist comprised about 

 twenty-five years. We now come to the third stage 

 of his life — Lamarck the zoologist and evolutionist. 

 He was in his fiftieth year when he assumed the 

 duties of his professorship of the zoology of the in- 

 vertebrate animals ; and at a period when many men 

 desire rest and freedom from responsibility, with the 

 vigor of an intellectual giant Lamarck took upon his 

 shoulders new labors in an untrodden field both in 

 pure science and philosophic thought. 



It was now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of 

 the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in Octo- 

 ber until the end of the year, was in the deadliest 

 throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, 

 placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la 

 Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, 

 a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now 

 stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers 

 in the Museum, for sansculottism in its most aggres- 

 sive and hideous forms raged not far from the Jardin 

 des Plantes, then just on the border of the densest 

 part of the Paris of the first Revolution. Lavoisier, 

 the founder of modern chemistry, was guillotined 

 some months later. The Abb6 Haiiy, the founder of 



