cond meeting (August 24th) he took no part in the
proceedings, and absented himself from the third, held on August 27,
1790. It will be seen that even while the office of Intendant lasted,
that official took no active part in the meetings or in the work of the
institution, and from that day to this it has been solely under the
management of a director and scientific corps of professors, all of them
original investigators as well as teachers. Certainly the most practical
and efficient sort of organization for such an establishment.[26]

Lamarck, though holding a place subordinate to the other officers, was
present, as the records of the proceedings of the officers of the Jardin
des Plantes at this meeting show.

During the middle of 1791, the Intendant, La Billarderie, after "four
years of incapacity," placed his resignation in the hands of the king.
The Minister of the Interior, instead of nominating Daubenton as
Intendant, reserved the place for a _protege_, and, July 1, 1791, sent
in the name of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the
distinguished author of _Paul et Virginie_ and of _Etudes sur la
Nature_. The new Intendant was literary in his tastes, fond of nature,
but not a practical naturalist. M. Hamy wittily states that "Bernardin
Saint-Pierre contemplated and dreamed, and in his solitary meditations
had imagined a system of the world which had nothing in common with that
which was to be seen in the Faubourg Saint Victor, and one can readily
imagine the welcome that the officers of the Jardin gave to the singular
naturalist the Tuileries had sent them."[27]

Lamarck suffered an indignity from the intermeddling of this second
Intendant of the Jardin. In his budget of expenses[28] sent to the
Minister of the Interior, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre took occasion to
refer to Lamarck in a disingenuous and blundering way, which may have
both amused and disgusted him.

But the last days of the Jardin du Roi were drawing to a close, and a
new era in French natural science, signalized by the reorganization of
the Jardin and Cabinet under the name of the _Museum d'Histoire
Naturelle_, was dawning. On the 6th of February, 1793, the National
Convention, at the request of Lakanal,[29] ordered the Committees of
Public Instruction and of Finances to at once make a report on the new
organization of the administration of the Jardin des Plantes.

Lakanal consulted with Daubenton, and inquired into the condition and
needs o