ree printing presses for different works,
besides delivering a course of lectures."

The petition was granted. At about this period a pension of twelve
hundred francs from the Academy of Sciences, and which had increased to
three thousand francs, had ceased eighteen months previously to be paid
to him. But at the time (an II.) Lamarck was "charge de sept enfans,"
and this appropriation was a most welcome addition to his small salary.

The next year (an III.) he again applied for a similar allowance from
the funds providing an indemnity for men of letters and artists "whose
talents are useful to the Republic." Again referring to the _Flore
Francaise_, and his desire to prepare a second edition of it, and his
other works and travels in the interest of botanical science, he says:

"If I had been less overburdened by needs of all kinds for some
years, and especially since the suppression of my pension from the
aforesaid Academy of Sciences, I should prepare the second edition
of this useful work; and this would be, without doubt, indeed, the
opportunity of making a new present to my country.

"Since my return to France I have worked on the completion of my
great botanical enterprises, and indeed for about ten years past my
works have obliged me to keep in constant activity a great number of
artists, such as draughtsmen, engravers, and printers. But these
important works that I have begun, and have in a well-advanced
state, have been in spite of all my efforts suspended and
practically abandoned for the last ten years. The loss of my pension
from the Academy of Sciences and the enormous increase in the price
of articles of subsistence have placed me, with my numerous family,
in a state of distress which leaves me neither the time nor the
freedom from care to cultivate science in a fruitful way."

Lamarck's collection of shells, the accumulation of nearly thirty
years,[38] was purchased by the government at the price of five thousand
livres. This sum was used by him to balance the price of a national
estate for which he had contracted by virtue of the law of 28 ventose de
l'an IV.[39] This little estate, which was the old domain of Beauregard,
was a modest farm-house or country-house at Hericourt-Saint-Samson, in
the Department of Seine-et-Oise, not far to the northward of Beauvais,
and about fifty miles from Paris. It is probable that as a proprietor of
a landed property he passed the su