oble character and generous disposition are constantly revealed in
his writings.

The name of Lamarck has been familiar to me from my youth up. When a
boy, I used to arrange my collection of shells by the Lamarckian system,
which had replaced the old Linnean classification. For over thirty years
the Lamarckian factors of evolution have seemed to me to afford the
foundation on which natural selection rests, to be the primary and
efficient causes of organic change, and thus to account for the origin
of variations, which Darwin himself assumed as the starting point or
basis of his selection theory. It is not lessening the value of Darwin's
labors, to recognize the originality of Lamarck's views, the vigor with
which he asserted their truth, and the heroic manner in which, against
adverse and contemptuous criticism, to his dying day he clung to them.

During a residence in Paris in the spring and summer of 1899, I spent my
leisure hours in gathering material for this biography. I visited the
place of his birth--the little hamlet of Bazentin, near Amiens--and,
thanks to the kindness of the schoolmaster of that village, M. Duval,
was shown the house where Lamarck was born, the records in the old
parish register at the _mairie_ of the birth of the father of Lamarck
and of Lamarck himself. The Jesuit Seminary at Amiens was also visited,
in order to obtain traces of his student life there, though the search
was unsuccessful.

My thanks are due to Professor A. Giard of Paris for kind assistance in
the loan of rare books, for copies of his own essays, especially his
_Lecon d'Ouverture des Cours de l'Evolution des Etres organises_, 1888,
and in facilitating the work of collecting data. Introduced by him to
Professor Hamy, the learned anthropologist and archivist of the Museum
d'Histoire Naturelle, I was given by him the freest access to the
archives in the Maison de Buffon, which, among other papers, contained
the MS. _Archives du Museum_; _i.e._, the _Proces verbaux des Seances
tenues par les Officiers du Jardin des Plantes_, from 1790 to 1830,
bound in vellum, in thirty-four volumes. These were all looked through,
though found to contain but little of biographical interest relating to
Lamarck, beyond proving that he lived in that ancient edifice from 1793
until his death in 1829. Dr. Hamy's elaborate history of the last years
of the Royal Garden and of the foundation of the Museum d'Histoire
Naturelle, in the volume commemorati