system
of meteorological reports lasted but a short time, and was not
maintained by Chaptal's successor. After three of these annual reports
had appeared, Lamarck rather suddenly stopped publishing them, and an
incident occurred in connection with their cessation which led to the
story that he had suffered ill treatment and neglect from Napoleon I.

It has been supposed that Lamarck, who was frank and at times brusque in
character, had made some enemies, and that he had been represented to
the Emperor as a maker of almanacs and of weather predictions, and that
Napoleon, during a reception, showing to Lamarck his great
dissatisfaction with the annuals, had ordered him to stop their
publication.

But according to Bourguin's statement this is not the correct version.
He tells us:

"According to traditions preserved in the family of Lamarck things
did not happen so at all. During a reception given to the Institute
at the Tuileries, Napoleon, who really liked Lamarck, spoke to him
in a jocular way about his weather probabilities, and Lamarck, very
much provoked (_tres contrarie_) at being thus chaffed in the
presence of his colleagues, resolved to stop the publication of his
observations on the weather. What proves that this version is the
true one is that Lamarck published another annual which he had in
preparation for the year 1810. In the preface he announced that his
age, ill health, and his circumstances placed him in the unfortunate
necessity of ceasing to busy himself with this periodical work. He
ended by inviting those who had the taste for meteorological
observations, and the means of devoting their time to it, to take up
with confidence an enterprise good in itself, based on a genuine
foundation, and from which the public would derive advantageous
results."

These opuscles, such as they were, in which Lamarck treated different
subjects bearing on the winds, great droughts, rainy seasons, tides,
etc., became the precursors of the _Annuaires du Bureau des
Longitudes_.

An observation of Lamarck's on a rare and curious form of cloud has
quite recently been referred to by a French meteorologist. It is
probable, says M. E. Durand-Greville in _La Nature_, November 24, 1900,
that Lamarck was the first to observe the so-called pocky or festoon
cloud, or mammato-cirrus cloud, which at rare intervals has been
observed since his time.[59]

Full of over confidence in the correctness of