MEMOIR OF LAMARCK.
I take the following memoir of Lamarck entirely from the biographical
sketch prefixed by M. Martins to his excellent edition of the
'Philosophie Zoologique.'[184] From this sketch I find that "Lamarck was
born August 1, 1744, at Barenton, in Picardy, being the eleventh child
of Pierre de Monet, squire of the place, a man of old family, but poor.
His father intended him for the Church, the ordinary resource of younger
sons at that time, and accordingly placed him under the care of the
Jesuits at Amiens. But this was not his vocation: the annals of his
family spoke all to him of military glory; his eldest brother had died
in the breaches at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom; two others were still
serving in the army, and France was exhausting her energies in an
unequal struggle. His father would not yield to his wishes, but on his
death, in 1760, Lamarck was left free to take his own line, and made his
way at once--upon a very bad horse--to the army of Germany, then
encamped at Lippstadt in Westphalia.
"He was the bearer of a letter written by Madame de Lameth, one of his
neighbours in the country, and recommending him to M. de Lastic, colonel
of the regiment of Beaujolais. This gentleman, on seeing before him a
lad of seventeen, whose somewhat stunted growth made him look still
younger than he really was, sent the youth immediately to his own
quarters. The next day a battle was immediately impending, and M. de
Lastic, on passing his regiment in review, saw his protege in the first
rank of a company of grenadiers. The French army was under the orders of
the Marshal de Broglie and of the Prince de Soubise; the allied troops
were commanded by Ferdinand of Brunswick. The two French generals were
beaten owing to their divided counsels, and Lamarck's company, almost
annihilated by the enemy's fire, was forgotten in the confusion of the
retreat. All the officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, were
killed, and only fourteen men out of the whole company remained alive:
the eldest proposed to retreat, but Lamarck, improvising himself as
commander, declared that they ought not to retire without orders.
Presently the colonel seeing that this company did not rally sent an
orderly officer who made his way up to it by protected paths. Next day
Lamarck was made an officer, and shortly afterwards lieutenant.
"Fortunately for science," continues M. Martins, "this brilliant _debut_
was not to decide his career. After peace had been signed he was sent
into garrison at Toulon and Monaco, where an inflammation of the
lymphatic ganglions of the neck necessitated an operation which left him
deeply scarred for life.
"The vegetation in the neighbourhood of Toulon and Monaco now arrested
the young officer's attention. He had already derived some little
knowledge of botany from the '_Traite des Plantes usuelles_' of Chomel.
Having retired from the service, and having nothing beyond his modest
pension of four hundred francs a year, he took a situation at Paris with
a banker; but drawn irresistibly to the study of nature, he used to
study from his attic window the forms and movements of clouds, and made
himself familiar with the plants in the Jardin du Roi or in the public
gardens. He began to feel that he was on his right path, and understood,
as Voltaire said of Condorcet, that discoveries of permanent value could
make him no less illustrious than military glory.
"Dissatisfied with the botanical systems of his time, in six months he
wrote his '_Flore francaise_,' preceded by the '_Cle dichotomique_,'
with the help of which it is easy even for a beginner to arrive with
certainty at the name of the plant before him." Of this work, M. Martins
tells us in a note, that the second edition, published by Candolle in
1815, is still the standard work on French plants.
"In 1778 Rousseau had brought botany into vogue. Women and men of
fashion took to it. Buffon had the three volumes of '_Flore francaise_'
printed at the royal press, and in the following year Lamarck entered
the Academy of Sciences. Buffon being anxious that his son should
travel, gave him Lamarck for his companion and tutor. He thus made a
trip through Holland, Germany, and Hungary, and became acquainted with
Gleditsch at Berlin, with Jacquin at Vienna, and with Murray at
Gottingen.
"The '_Encyclopedie methodique_,' begun by Diderot and D'Alembert, was
not yet completed. For this work Lamarck wrote four volumes, describing
all the then known plants whose names began with the letters from A to
P. This great work was completed by Poiret, and comprises twelve
volumes, which appeared between the years 1783 and 1817. A still more
important work, also part of the Encyclopedia, and continually quoted by
botanists, is the '_Illustration des Genres_.' In this work Lamarck
describes two thousand _genera_, and illustrates them, according to the
title-page, with nine hundred engravings. Only a botanist can form any
idea of the research in collections, gardens, and books, which such a
work must have involved. But Lamarck's activity was inexhaustible.
Sonnerat returned from India in 1781 with a very large number of dried
plants; no one except Lamarck thought it worth while to inspect them,
and Sonnerat, charmed with his enthusiasm, gave him the whole
magnificent collection.
"In spite, however, of his incessant toil, Lamarck's position continued
to be most precarious. He lived by his pen, as a publisher's hack, and
it was with difficulty that he obtained even the poorly paid post of
keeper of the king's cabinet of dried plants. Like most other
naturalists he had thus to contend with incessant difficulties during a
period of fifteen years.
"At length fortune bettered his condition while changing the direction
of his labours. France was now under the Convention; what Carnot had
done for the army Lakanal undertook to do for the natural sciences. At
his suggestion a museum of natural history was established. Professors
had been found for all the chairs save that of Zoology; but in that time
of enthusiasm, so different from the present, France could find men of
war and men of science wherever and whenever she had need of them.
Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire was twenty-one years old, and was engaged
in the study of mineralogy under Hauey. Daubenton said to him, 'I will
undertake the responsibility for your inexperience. 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 Geoffroy 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 unexplored territory into which Linnaeus had
declined to enter, 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 established that great division of
animals into vertebrate and invertebrate, which science has ever since
recognized.
"Dividing the vertebrate animals--as Linnaeus had already divided
them--into mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, he divided the
invertebrates into molluscs, insects, worms, echinoderms, and polyps. In
1799 he separated the crustacea from the insects, with which they had
been classed hitherto; in 1800 he established the arachnids as a class
distinct from the insects; in 1802 that of the annelids, a subdivision
of the worms, and that of the radiata as distinct from the polyps. Time
has approved the wisdom of these divisions, founded all of them upon the
organic type of the creatures themselves--that is to say, upon the
rational method introduced into zoology by Cuvier, Lamarck, and Geoffroy
St. Hilaire.
"This introduction being devoted only to Lamarck's labours as a
naturalist, we will pass over certain works in which he treats of
physics and chemistry. These attempts--errors of a powerful mind which
thought itself able by the help of pure reason to establish truths which
rest only upon experience--attempts, moreover, which were some of them
but resuscitations of exploded theories, such as that of
'phlogistic'--had not even the honour of being refuted: they did not
deserve to be so, and should be a warning to all those who would write
upon a subject without the necessary practical knowledge.
. . . . . .
"At the beginning of this century there was not yet any such science as
geology. People observed but little, and in lieu of observation made
theories to embrace the entire globe. Lamarck made his in 1802, and
twenty-three years later the judicious Cuvier still yielded to the
prevailing custom in publishing his 'Discoveries on the Earth's
Revolutions.'
"Lamarck's merit was to have discovered that there had been no
catastrophes, but that the gradual action of forces during thousands of
ages accounted for the changes observable upon the face of the earth,
better than any sudden and violent perturbations. 'Nature,' he writes,
'has no difficulty on the score of time; she has it always at command;
it is with her a boundless space in which she has room for the greatest
as for the smallest operations.'"
Here we must not forget Buffon's fine passage, "Nature's great workman
is Time," &c. See page 103.
"Lamarck," continues M. Martins, "was the first to distinguish littoral
from ocean fossils, but no one accepts his theory that oceans make their
beds deeper owing to the action of the tides, and distribute themselves
differently over the earth's surface without any change of level of the
different parts of that surface.
. . . . . .
"Settling down to a single branch of science, in consequence of his
professorship, Lamarck now devoted himself to the twofold labour of
lecturing and classifying the collections at the museum. In 1802 he
published his 'Considerations on the Organization of Living Bodies'; in
1809 his '_Philosophie Zoologique_,' a development of the
'Considerations'; and from 1816 to 1822 his Natural History of the
invertebrate animals, in seven volumes. This is his great work, and,
being entirely a work of description and classification, was received
with the unanimous approbation of the scientific world. His 'Fossil
Shells of the Neighbourhood of Paris'--a work in which his profound
knowledge of existing shells enabled him to class with certainty the
remains of forms that had disappeared thousands of ages ago--met also
with a favourable reception.
"Lamarck was fifty years old before he began to study zoology; and
prolonged microscopic examinations first fatigued and at length
enfeebled his eyesight. The clouds which obscured it gradually
thickened, and he became quite blind. Married four times, the father of
seven children, he saw his small patrimony and even his earlier savings
swallowed up by one of those hazardous investments with which promoters
impose on the credulity of the public. His small endowment as professor
alone protected him from destitution. Men of science whom his reputation
as a botanist and zoologist had attracted near him, wondered at the
manner in which he was neglected.
. . . . . .
"He passed the last ten years of his laborious life in darkness, tended
only by the affectionate care of his two daughters. The eldest wrote
from his dictation part of the sixth and seventh volumes of his work on
the invertebrate animals. From the time her father became confined to
his room his daughter never left the house; and when first she did so
after his death, she was distressed by the fresh air to which she had
been so long a stranger.
"Lamarck died December 18, 1829, at the age of eighty-five. Latreille
and Blainville were his successors at the museum. The incredible
activity of the first professor had so greatly increased the number of
the known invertebrata that it was found necessary to endow two
professors, where one had originally been sufficient.
"His two daughters were left penniless. In the year 1832 I myself saw
Mlle. Cornelie de Lamarck earning a scanty pittance by fastening dried
plants on to paper, in the museum of which her father had been a
professor. Many a species named and described by him must have passed
under her eyes and increased the bitterness of her regret."[185]
FOOTNOTES:
[184] Paris, 1873.
[185] Introduction Biographique to M. Martins' edition of the 'Phil.
Zool.,' pp. ix-xx.