lls, nearly a foot and a
half thick, built of brick; the corners and windows of blocks of white
limestone. It is about fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Above
the roof formerly rose a small tower. There is no porch over the front
door. Within, a rather narrow hall passes through the centre, and opens
into a large room on each side. What was evidently the drawing-room or
_salon_ was a spacious apartment with a low white wainscot and a heavy
cornice. Over the large, roomy fireplace is a painting on the wood
panel, representing a rural scene, in which a shepherdess and her lover
are engaged in other occupations than the care of the flock of sheep
visible in the distance. Over the doorway is a smaller but quaint
painting of the same description. The house is uninhabited, and perhaps
uninhabitable--indeed almost a ruin--and is used as a storeroom for wood
and rubbish by the peasants in the adjoining house to the left, on the
south.

The ground in front was cultivated with vegetables, not laid down to a
lawn, and the land stretched back for perhaps three hundred to four
hundred feet between the old garden walls.

Here, amid these rural scenes, even now so beautiful and tranquil, the
subject of our sketch was born and lived through his infancy and early
boyhood.[1]

If his parents did not possess an ample fortune, they were blessed with
a numerous progeny, for Lamarck was the eleventh and youngest child, and
seems to have survived all the others. Biographers have differed as to
the date of the birth of Lamarck.[2] Happily the exact date had been
ascertained through the researches of M. Philippe Salmon; and M. Duval
kindly showed us in the thin volume of records, with its tattered and
torn leaves, the register of the _Acte de Naissance_, and made a copy of
it, as follows:

_Extrait du Registre aux Actes de Bapteme de la Commune de Bazentin,
pour l'Annee 1744._

L'an mil sept cent quarante-quatre, le premier aout est ne en
legitime mariage et le lendemain a ete baptise par moy cure
soussigne Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine, fils de Messire Jacques
Philippe de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, seigneur des Bazentin grand
et petit et de haute et puissante Dame Marie Francoise de Fontaine
demeurant en leur chateau de Bazentin le petit, son parrain a ete
Messire Jean Baptiste de Fosse, pretre-chanoine de l'eglise
collegiale de St. Farcy de Peronne, y demeurant, sa marraine Dame
Antoinette Francoise de B