near
Paris, and there for a year they studied together science and history.
And now happened an event which proved to be the turning point, or
rather gave a new and lasting impetus to Lamarck's career and decided
his vocation in life. In one of their walks they met the philosopher and
sentimentalist, Jean Jacques Rousseau. We know little about Lamarck's
acquaintance with this genius, for all the details of his life, both in
his early and later years, are pitifully scanty. Lamarck, however, had
attended at the Jardin du Roi a botanical course, and now, having by
good fortune met Rousseau, he probably improved the acquaintance, and,
found by Rousseau to be a congenial spirit, he was soon invited to
accompany him in his herborizations.

Still more recently Professor Giard[12] has unearthed from the works of
Rousseau the following statement by him regarding species: "Est-ce qu'a
proprement parler il n'existerait point d'especes dans la nature, mais
seulement des individus?"[13] In his _Discours sur l'Inegalite parmi les
Hommes_ is the following passage, which shows, as Giard says, that
Rousseau perfectly understood the influence of the _milieu_ and of wants
on the organism; and this brilliant writer seems to have been the first
to suggest natural selection, though only in the case of man, when he
says that the weaker in Sparta were eliminated in order that the
superior and stronger of the race might survive and be maintained.

"Accustomed from infancy to the severity of the weather and the
rigors of the seasons, trained to undergo fatigue, and obliged to
defend naked and without arms their life and their prey against
ferocious beasts, or to escape them by flight, the men acquired an
almost invariably robust temperament; the infants, bringing into the
world the strong constitution of their fathers, and strengthening
themselves by the same kind of exercise as produced it, have thus
acquired all the vigor of which the human species is capable. Nature
uses them precisely as did the law of Sparta the children of her
citizens. She rendered strong and robust those with a good
constitution, and destroyed all the others. Our societies differ in
this respect, where the state, in rendering the children burdensome
to the father, indirectly kills them before birth."[14]

Soon Lamarck abandoned not only a military career, but also music,
medicine, and the bank, and devoted himself exclusively to science. He