d to two. Afterwards they saw that this
number was insufficient, and to-day (1863) the department of zooelogy is
administered at the museum by four professors, in conformity with the
division indicated by Lamarck."

CHAPTER IV

PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOeLOGY AT THE MUSEUM

Lamarck's career as a botanist comprised about twenty-five years. We now
come to the third stage of his life--Lamarck the zooelogist and
evolutionist. He was in his fiftieth year when he assumed the duties of
his professorship of the zooelogy of the invertebrate animals; and at a
period when many men desire rest and freedom from responsibility, with
the vigor of an intellectual giant Lamarck took upon his shoulders new
labors in an untrodden field both in pure science and philosophic
thought.

It was now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of the Reign of Terror,
when Paris, from early in October until the end of the year, was in the
deadliest throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, placed
in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la Revolution, which is now
the Place de la Concorde, a little to the east of where the obelisk of
Luxor now stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers in the
Museum, for sansculottism in its most aggressive and hideous forms raged
not far from the Jardin des Plantes, then just on the border of the
densest part of the Paris of the first Revolution. Lavoisier, the
founder of modern chemistry, was guillotined some months later. The Abbe
Hauey, the founder of crystallography, had been, the year previous,
rescued from prison by young Geoffroy St. Hilaire, his neck being barely
saved from the gleaming axe. Roland, the friend of science and letters,
had been so hunted down that at Rouen, in a moment of despair, on
hearing of his wife's death, he thrust his sword-cane through his heart.
Madame Roland had been beheaded, as also a cousin of her husband, and we
can well imagine that these fateful summer and autumn days were scarcely
favorable to scientific enterprises.[32] Still, however, amid the loud
alarums of this social tempest, the Museum underwent a new birth which
proved not to be untimely. The Minister of the Interior (Garat) invited
the professors of the Museum to constitute an assembly to nominate a
director and a treasurer, and he begged them to present extracts of
their deliberations for him to send to the executive council, "under the
supervision of which the National Museum is for