nited States, Germany, England, and especially in
France, where its author is justly regarded as the real founder of
organic evolution, has invested his name with a new interest, and led to
a desire to learn some of the details of his life and work, and of his
theory as he unfolded it in 1800 and subsequent years, and finally
expounded it in 1809. The time seems ripe, therefore, for a more
extended sketch of Lamarck and his theory, as well as of his work as a
philosophical biologist, than has yet appeared.

But the seeker after the details of his life is baffled by the general
ignorance about the man--his antecedents, his parentage, the date of his
birth, his early training and education, his work as a professor in the
Jardin des Plantes, the house he lived in, the place of his burial, and
his relations to his scientific contemporaries.

Except the _eloges_ of Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier, and the brief
notices of Martins, Duval, Bourguignat, and Bourguin, there is no
special biography, however brief, except a _brochure_ of thirty-one
pages, reprinted from a few scattered articles by the distinguished
anthropologist, M. Gabriel de Mortillet, in the fourth and last volume
of a little-known journal, _l'Homme_, entitled _Lamarck. Par un Groupe
de Transformistes, ses Disciples_, Paris, 1887. This exceedingly rare
pamphlet was written by the late M. Gabriel de Mortillet, with the
assistance of Philippe Salmon and Dr. A. Mondiere, who with others,
under the leadership of Paul Nicole, met in 1884 and formed a _Reunion
Lamarck_ and a _Diner Lamarck_, to maintain and perpetuate the memory of
the great French transformist. Owing to their efforts, the exact date of
Lamarck's birth, the house in which he lived during his lifetime at
Paris, and all that we shall ever know of his place of burial have been
established. It is a lasting shame that his remains were not laid in a
grave, but were allowed to be put into a trench, with no headstone to
mark the site, on one side of a row of graves of others better cared
for, from which trench his bones, with those of others unknown and
neglected, were exhumed and thrown into the catacombs of Paris. Lamarck
left behind him no letters or manuscripts; nothing could be ascertained
regarding the dates of his marriages, the names of his wives or of all
his children. Of his descendants but one is known to be living, an
officer in the army. But his aims in life, his undying love of science,
his n