oul, and this affectionate impulse became a
fundamental element in the nature of one of the greatest of
zooelogical geniuses of our epoch."

Once settled in his new line of work, Lamarck, the incipient zooelogist,
at a period in life when many students of less flexible and energetic
natures become either hide-bound and conservative, averse to taking up a
different course of study, or actually cease all work and rust
out--after a half century of his life had passed, this rare spirit,
burning with enthusiasm, charged like some old-time knight or explorer
into a new realm and into "fresh fields and pastures new." His spirit,
still young and fresh after nearly thirty years of mental toil, so
unrequited in material things, felt a new stimulus as he began to
investigate the lower animals, so promising a field for discovery.

He said himself:

"That which is the more singular is that the most important
phenomena to be considered have been offered to our meditations only
since the time when attention has been paid to the animals least
perfect, and when researches on the different complications of the
organization of these animals have become the principal foundation
of their study. It is not less singular to realize that it was
almost always from the examination of the smallest objects which
nature presents to us, and that of considerations which seem to us
the most minute, that we have obtained the most important knowledge
to enable us to arrive at the discovery of her laws, and to
determine her course."

After a year of preparation he opened his course at the Museum in the
spring of 1794. In his introductory lecture, given in 1803, after ten
years of work on the lower animals, he addressed his class in these
words:

"Indeed it is among those animals which are the most multiplied and
numerous in nature, and the most ready to regenerate themselves,
that we should seek the most instructive facts bearing on the course
of nature, and on the means she has employed in the creation of her
innumerable productions. In this case we perceive that, relatively
to the animal kingdom, we should chiefly devote our attention to the
invertebrate animals, because their enormous multiplicity in nature,
the singular diversity of their systems of organization and of their
means of multiplication, their increasing simplification, and the
extreme fugacity of those which compose the lowest orders of