1805
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, stipple engraving by J. Hopwood.
1824
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, stipple engraving by A. Tardieu.
1893
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck by J. Pizzetta, 1893.
1924
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, etching by P. F. Gachet.
An engraving of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at 35 years of age.
French Academy of Sciences, Paris, France
Lamarck was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich, Germany
Lamarck was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
1805
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, stipple engraving by J. Hopwood.
1824
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, stipple engraving by A. Tardieu.
1893
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck by J. Pizzetta, 1893.
1924
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, etching by P. F. Gachet.
Portrait sculpture of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
French Academy of Sciences, Paris, France
Lamarck was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich, Germany
Lamarck was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
An engraving of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at 35 years of age.
https://www.amazon.com/Zoological-Philosophy-Exposition-Natural-History/dp/B008NGN1UY/?tag=2022091-20
1809
https://www.amazon.com/Histoire-Naturelle-Animaux-Vertebres-French/dp/0526845155/?tag=2022091-20
1815
https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Introduction-Lamarcks-Conchology-Descriptions/dp/1340075369/?tag=2022091-20
1827
biologist educator military naturalist scientist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was born on August 1, 1744, in Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, France. He was the youngest of eleven children born to Marie-Françoise de Fontaines de Chuignolles and Philippe Jacques de Monet de La Marck. His parents were among the semi-impoverished lesser nobility of northern France; his father, following family tradition, served as a military officer.
It was primarily economic and social considerations which led Lamarck's parents to select the priesthood as his future career. Lamarck, at about age eleven, was sent to the Jesuit school at Amiens; he was not, however, interested in a religious career and much preferred the military life of his father and older brothers. When his father died in 1760, Lamarck left school in search of military glory. After 1768 he studied medicine for four years and became increasingly interested in meteorology, chemistry, and shell collecting, but gave it up under his elder brother's persuasion. He was interested in botany, especially after his visits to the Jardin du Roi, and he became a student under Bernard de Jussieu, a notable French naturalist. Under Jussieu, Lamarck spent 10 years studying French flora.
Lamarck was fighting with a French army in the Seven Years’ War. After the war was over, he spent five years (1763-1768) at various French forts on the Mediterranean and eastern borders of France. It was during this period that he began botanizing; his military transfers served to acquaint him with highly diverse types of French flora. In 1768 Lamarck left military service because of illness and after several years found a job in a Paris bank.
Lamarck’s recognition by the French scientific community resulted from the publication of his Flore française in 1779. His innovation was the establishment of dichotomous keys to aid in the identification of French plants; by eliminating large groups of plants at each stage through the use of mutually exclusive characteristics, the given name of any plant could be rapidly determined. This “method of analysis,” as Lamarck called it, was much easier to use in identifying plants than Linnaeus’ artificial system of classification, which was based on sexual differences among plants or the natural methods of classification then developing in France with the work of Adanson, Bernard de Jussieu, and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. Lamarck’s new approach and his criticisms of Linnaeus impressed Buffon, who arranged to have the Flore published by the government. The first of the three volumes contained a theoretical “Discours préliminaire” which, among other things, explained the method of analysis and a lengthy exposition of the fundamentals of botany. The other two volumes listed all known French plants according to his method of classification and provided good descriptions of each species.
The Flore was one of the first French works to include the Linnaean nomenclature as well as that of Tournefort. Written in French rather than Latin, the Flore was an immediate success and the first printing was sold out within the year; in 1780 the work was reprinted. Lamarck had various plans for a new edition but was unable to carry them out for lack of funds. Finally, in 1795, the Flore was reprinted; although it did not differ from the first edition, it was called a second edition. In 1802 Lamarck, who was too busy doing other things, turned the preparation of a new edition over to A. P. de Candolle, who published what is called the third edition in 1805. Candolle made major revisions, replacing Lamarck’s system of classification with that of A. L. de Jussieu and revising the section on the fundamentals of botany to include new scientific discoveries. Ten years later this third edition was reprinted and another volume was added to include species previously unknown or overlooked.
Lamarck’s other major work in botany was his contribution to the Dictionnaire de botanique, which formed part of the larger Encyclopédie méthodique. He wrote the first three and a half of eight volumes; they were published in 1783, 1786, 1789, and 1795. Lamarck composed a long “Discours préliminaire,” articles on all aspects of botany including classification and the structures of plants, and articles describing specific plants and their classificatory groupings. The companion piece to the Dictionnaire, the Illustration des genres, appeared in three volumes in 1791, 1798, and 1800. It included about 900 plates, descriptions of genera arranged according to Linnaeus’ system of classification, and a listing of all known species in these genera. Lamarck himself had identified several new genera and species; he published these discoveries as articles in various publications from 1784 to 1792.
In addition to devising a new and useful method for the identification of plants and doing systematic botany, Lamarck demonstrated a number of theoretical and philosophical interests in his botanical works. In the “Discours préliminaire” of the Flore, Lamarck made his first attempt to formulate a natural method of classification for the vegetable kingdom. His aim was to discover the position every vegetable species should occupy in a graduated unilinear chain of being on the basis of comparative structural relationships. Unable to achieve this, he had to settle for a natural order at the level of the genera and even this was very tentative. Although he shared a common assumption of the time, that a natural classification would begin with the most complex and descend to the simplest organism, he found that in practice it was easier to work in the opposite order. This order would later be an essential feature of his evolutionary theory. Lamarck intended to develop his natural method in a work which was to be entitled Théâtre universel de botanique. The proposed work was to include all members of the vegetable kingdom, not just those found in France; it was never written.
In the Dictionnaire de botanique Lamarck developed the theoretical and philosophical ideas he had advanced in the Flore. The “Discours préliminaire” was an expanded version of the history of botany from the Fiore and it showed even more fully Lamarck’s belief in the idea of progress. Lamarck himself had made some progress in his search for a natural method of vegetable classification. Following some suggestions from A. L. de Jussieu, he decided that a hierarchical arrangement could be established only for the larger groupings or classes of plants. A focus on classes rather than genera or species would later be an important part of his evolutionary theory. Lamarck’s new views were set forth in the article “Classe,” in which he listed the classes of plants, arranged from the most complex to the least complex; placement on the scale was determined by relative structural complexity. To complete the realm of living organisms, Lamarck presented a parallel series of descending classes for the animal kingdom. In pointing out the similarities between plants and animals, he laid the foundations for his biology. In another table the nonliving natural productions were also arranged in order of decreasing complexity. Lamarck held that all mineral substances were produced by organic beings as they and their waste products decayed over time and their debris underwent successive transformations until the simple element level was reached. The fact that Lamarck drew up these tables of comparison shows his concern with seeing nature as a whole.
During the 1790s, Lamarck’s interests and studies turned away from botany to new fields. After 1800, when he began advocating his theory of evolution, he wrote only one work specifically dealing with botany. His two-volume Introduction à la botanique (1803) formed part of the fifteen-volume Histoire naturelle des végétaux, the rest of the work was written by Mirbel. This study of the vegetable kingdom was in turn part of the larger eighty-volume Cours complet d'histoire naturelle pour faire suite à Bujfon edited by Castel. Lamarck's Introduction was his only botanical work to include his evolutionary theory. He stressed that for the vegetable kingdom a natural order of classification beginning with the simplest class and ending with the most complex class reflected the order which nature had followed in producing these groups in time. Although this was his last botanical work, Lamarck did not stop thinking about the vegetable kingdom. He discussed it in all of his evolutionary works and drew a number of examples from it.
Lamarck’s election to the Académie des Sciences as an adjoint botanist was engineered by Buffon in 1779. He was promoted to an associate botanist in 1783 and became a pensioner in 1790. The Academy was suppressed in 1793, during the Terror; it was reorganized two years later as part of the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts. From 1795 until his death, Lamarck was a resident member of the botanical section. Until his health failed, he attended meetings regularly and prepared a number of reports on works submitted to the Academy.
In the I790s Lamarck took an active role in the newly formed Société d’Histoire Naturelle, which included the prominent French naturalists of the time. He helped edit several of its publications and contributed a number of articles on botany and invertebrates to them.
Lamarck’s most significant institutional affiliation was with the Jardin du Roi, which had become an important scientific center in the second half of the eighteenth century under the leadership of Buffon. From 1788 until 1793, Lamarck held various minor botanical positions there. During the French revolution, when all the institutions of the ancien régime were being subjected to critical examination, suggestions were made for the reorganization of the Jardin du Roi, among them a memoir by Lamarck. In 1793, when the academies were suppressed as privileged institutions of the old order, the Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The botanical positions were filled by others and Lamarck was made a professor of zoology for the study of “insects and worms,” a group of animals which he renamed “invertebrates.” While this represented a rather drastic shift in fields for him, Lamarck was not unhappy about it, for he had been developing an interest in these animals. His new duties consisted of giving courses and classifying the large collection of invertebrates at the museum. He also took an active part in the administration of the new institution. Lamarck’s own work benefited from contacts with his colleagues and their scientific investigations at the museum.
The first long works that Lamarck published after the reorganization of the museum dealt not with invertebrates but with chemistry, a subject in which he had been interested for many years. He had begun to study chemistry in the 1770s, when the four-element theory (earth, air, water, and fire) was generally accepted in France.
Lamarck’s first work in the field, Recherches sur les causes des principaux faits physiques, was begun in 1776. It was submitted to the Académie des Sciences in 1780 and received an unfavorable report; it was finally published in 1794, after the Academy had been suppressed. Lamarck devoted two other full-length studies to chemistry: Réfutation de la théorie pneumatique (1796) and Mémoires de physique et d'histoire naturelle (1797). He also published two articles in 1799; they were reprinted at the end of his Hydrogéologie (1802), which contained a long chapter relating his chemical theories to his geological theories. Although Lamarck’s chemical views were ignored, he continued to hold them; they appear with signs of increasing paranoia in his major evolutionary works. They play the most prominent role in Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivons (1802), the first full-length exposition of his evolutionary theories.
Lamarck’s work in meteorology was similar in many respects to that in chemistry. Although one of his earliest scientific interests, he did not publish anything until the late 1790s; he experienced the same general lack of reception of his work in chemistry. Meteorology was the first scientific area in which Lamarck prepared a memoir and one which was well received by the Academy. The manuscript of this unpublished memoir shows that as early as 1776, Lamarck was interested in the effects of climate on living organisms. It is highly probable that Lamarck’s interest in chemistry resulted from his concern with certain aspects of meteorology. His general approach to science is also evident in this early manuscript: his emphasis is on the general principles, and he manifests disdain toward those devoted solely to the collection of little facts. The extent to which Lamarck saw his meteorology as part of his whole view of nature is indicated later in his Hydrogéologie, in which he states that a terrestrial physics would include three subjects: meteorology, hydrogeology, and biology. He originally intended to write a work dealing with these areas but decided to postpone the sections on meteorology and biology until he had done further research.
Lamarck continued his study of meteorology in the 1780s, while he was involved in botanical studies; his awareness of the importance of climate for plants has already been mentioned. In 1797 he began publishing articles on meteorology and attempting to provide theoretical explanations for factors causing weather change. Three years later he started publishing the Annuaire météorologique. It has often been said that Lamarck wrote these volumes with the sole intention of earning money, but he showed too great an interest in them and in defending his theories for that to have been the case. It was surely no coincidence that he was assembling his meteorological studies at the same time he was elaborating his theory of evolution. Since climate was an important factor in his theory, it would be important to seek the laws regulating changes in climate and therefore perhaps be able to predict or understand changes in organisms more fully.
Lamarck did have one public success with his meteorology. He recommended that the French government establish a central meteorological data bank. Following this suggestion, Chaptal established such a program in the ministry of the interior in 1800. One of Lamarck’s concerns was that the daily observations from all parts of France be made in accordance with standardized procedures and instruments. The project and Lamarck’s work in meteorology ended in 1810, when Napoleon ridiculed Lamarck’s Annuaire.
When the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle was established in 1793 and Lamarck made a professor of “insects and worms,” he had the tasks of organizing the museum collection and giving courses, beginning in the spring of 1794. His only previous connection with the invertebrates was his interest in shell collecting. He was, however, a good friend of his colleague, Jean- Guillaume Bruguière, who was considered an expert on invertebrates, especially the mollusks. When Bruguière died in 1798, Lamarck finished his Histoire des vers for the Encyclopédie méthodique. Lamarck’s published works in the field include a number of articles, in which he identified new genera and species and put forth some theoretical considerations, and books, the most important of which were Système des animaux sans vertèbres (1801) and his seven-volume major work, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815-1822).
Burkhardt has pointed out (1972) that Lamarck came to be regarded as an expert in conchology and the successor to Bruguière. Lamarck made an important contribution to the classification of shells in his “Prodrome d’une nouvelle classification des coquilles” (1799), in which he established 126 genera. Any attempt to classify shells immediately raised the problem of what to do with fossil forms. According to Burkhardt, the pressing question of the late 1790s was whether there were any similarities between living and fossil forms. If the answer were no, the way was open to a belief in extinction, especially extinction brought about by some catastrophe. The issue being debated involved vertebrates as well. Cuvier and others were making impressive discoveries of large mammalian fossils which seemed to have no living analogues. There were some people at the museum, however, who were discovering analogues. Alexandre Brongniart and, slightly later, Faujas de Saint-Fond and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were investigating similarities between some fossil and living reptiles.
Several naturalists, including Faujas, expected Lamarck’s investigations of shells from living and fossil forms to resolve the issue. His work did reveal a number of analogues. The question then became one of explaining the similarities and differences. Although the existence of analogues would rule out the possibility of a general catastrophe, more limited violent events could have produced some species extinction which would account for the failure to find analogues in many cases. There were, Burkhardt suggests, two other ways to explain the differences: migration or evolution. Lamarck, unable for philosophical reasons to entertain the possibility of extinction and unconvinced of migration as a plausible way to account for all the differences, chose an evolutionary explanation sometime in late 1799 or early 1800. Differences between living and fossil forms existed precisely because organisms had undergone change over time; Lamarck regarded this position as one of the strongest arguments against extinction. The study of fossil forms led Lamarck to conceive of nature as existing in time. Lamarck has often been called the founder of invertebrate paleontology. His most important work on the subject was Mémoires sur les fossiles des environs de Paris (1802-1806). The “Introduction” to this work discusses the significance of fossils for a theory of the earth.
Lamarck’s geology was closely connected with his work in other fields. His Hydrogéologie, which grew out of a 1799 memoir presented to the Academy and his work in invertebrate paleontology, was published in 1802. He originally intended it to be a much broader work, as the manuscript shows. It was to have been a terrestrial physics including meteorology, geology, and biology, a term he coined.
Aside from his legacies and the battles fought in his name, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck deserves an important place in the history of science. He made significant contributions in botany, invertebrate zoology and paleontology, and developed one of the first thoroughgoing theories of evolution.
Lamarck developed a system for the natural classification of invertebrates based on the anatomical findings of Cuvier. As in botany, the natural order consisted of classes arranged in a linear fashion from most complex to least complex. Such a series provided clear examples of degradation in anatomical structure and physiological function, as one system after another disappeared. Lamarck spoke of this degradation well before he advocated his theory of evolution, and that theory was first put forth as one of degradation. His study of invertebrates also helped him refine his definition of life, for the simplest organisms indicated the minimum conditions necessary for life. The origin (generation) of these simplest animals raised problems whose answer seemed to be spontaneous generation.
His chemistry showed a speculative orientation and an emphasis on nature as a whole with many interrelated parts and processes. His distinction between the living and the nonliving was crucial to his biology and his view of the mineralogical chain of being was basic to his geology. His chemistry was also later to be very important in his theory of evolution. It was used to provide a materialistic definition of life and to explain its maintenance, appearance (both through reproduction and through spontaneous generation), and the way in which living organisms gradually evolve, including the emergence of the higher mental faculties.
During his lifetime, Lamarck named a large number of species, many of which have become synonyms. The World Register of Marine Species gives no fewer than 1,634 records. The Indo-Pacific Molluscan Database gives 1,781 records. Among these are some well-known families such as the ark clams (Arcidae), the sea hares (Aplysiidae), and the cockles (Cardiidae). The International Plant Names Index gives 58 records, including a number of well-known genera such as the mosquito fern (Azolla).
The honeybee subspecies Apis mellifera lamarckii is named after Lamarck, as well as the bluefire jellyfish (Cyaneia lamarckii). A number of plants have also been named after him, including Amelanchier lamarckii (juneberry), Digitalis lamarckii, and Aconitum lamarckii, as well as the grass genus Lamarckia.
The International Plant Names Index gives 116 records of plant species named after Lamarck.
Among the marine species, no fewer than 103 species or genera carry the epithet "lamarcki," "lamarckii" or "lamarckiana," but many have since become synonyms.
In his book Philosophie Zoologique, Lamarck referred to God as the "sublime author of nature". Lamarck's religious views are examined in the book Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution (1901) by Alpheus Packard. According to Packard from Lamarck's writings, he may be regarded as a deist.
The philosopher of biology Michael Ruse described Lamarck, "as believing in God as an unmoved mover, creator of the world and its laws, who refuses to intervene miraculously in his creation." Biographer James Moore described Lamarck as a "thoroughgoing deist."
The historian Jacques Roger has written, "Lamarck was a materialist to the extent that he did not consider it necessary to have recourse to any spiritual principle... his deism remained vague, and his idea of creation did not prevent him from believing everything in nature, including the highest forms of life, was but the result of natural processes."
In the “Discours préliminaire” of the Flore, Lamarck showed the orientation of a naturalist philosopher concerned more with the broad problems than the little facts, as he called them. He conceived of nature as a whole composed of living and nonliving things, the former divided into plants and animals. It was the view of the whole, its processes, and interrelations which really interested him.
Lamarck, in the same work, demonstrated his awareness of the important influence of the environment, especially climate, on vegetable development. He noted that two seeds from the same plant growing in two very different environments would become two apparently different species. Lamarck was particularly conscious of the changes plants undergo in artificial cultivation, and he referred to such changes as degradation, the term he first used in describing evolutionary processes in 1800. In 1779, however, Lamarck still believed in fixed species and thought of the environment as the factor responsible for the production of varieties; by 1800 he had extended these views on the production of varieties to the origin of all organisms below the level of classes.
In 1779 Lamarck also demonstrated his genetic approach to a subject; the present is understood by tracing the historical steps that produced it, beginning with the most primitive level and working up through time to the more complex. Lamarck shared with the Philosophes a belief in the idea of progress in human knowledge, which is clearly seen in his brief history of botany. Increasing progress over time, it's almost inevitable if circumstances are favorable. He was later to apply such a conception to natural as well as human history.
He believed in the four elements throughout his life despite the work of Lavoisier and the chemical revolution; for this reason his chemistry has often been dismissed as worthless speculation. Yet Lamarck took it very seriously, and it was an important part of his ideas about nature and evolution. In Lamarck’s four-element theory, differences between compounds depended on both the number and proportion of the elements and the relative strengths of the bonds between the elements in the constituent molecules. Furthermore, each element had a natural state in which it demonstrated its real properties and several modified states in which it was present in compounds. The most important of the four elements in Lamarck’s chemistry was fire, which existed in three main states: a natural one and two modified forms, which were fire in a state of expansion (or caloric fire) and fixed fire. Using these three main states and their many internal modifications, Lamarck attempted to account for a great number of chemical and physical phenomena such as sound, electricity, magnetism, color, vaporization, liquefaction, and calcination. Later, in his theory of evolution, he added life as another phenomenon to be explained by activity of fire. For Lamarck, fire not only explained many processes, it also was a constituent principle of compounds. He attempted to show how chemical substances in their various states depended on differing amounts of fixed fire. One temporary form of fixed fire was phlogiston.
Lamarck believed that only living beings could produce chemical compounds. Plants combined free elements directly to produce a number of substances of varying complexity. These, in turn, were elaborated by the different animals eating the plants, the more complex substances being produced by those animals with the most highly organized physiological structure. The process of compound formation involved modification of the elements away from their natural state and the more complex the substance, the greater the modification. Once the forces of life were removed, by death or the elimination of waste products, the compounds began to disintegrate. The natural tendency of all compounds, therefore, was to decompose until the elements returned to their natural state, in the process producing all known inorganic substances. For the mineral kingdom there was a chain of being with continous degradation from the most complex to the simplest; this chain was composed of individuals rather than species or types of minerals. Lamarck’s first statement of his theory of evolution in 1800 showed a similar thought pattern: degradation and irrelevance of species.
Lamarck’s meteorology was devoted to a search for those laws of nature which regulate climatic change. The search was more important than the speculative theories he devised, for it indicates certain connections with the Enlightenment; he assumed that there must be simple discoverable laws governing weather changes. He also had grounds to think that such laws must exist because of Franklin’s success in identifying lightning and terrestrial electricity; he greatly admired Franklin. In addition, a number of his contemporaries were studying meteorological phenomena, improving instruments, and theorizing. Lamarck was familiar with their work and used it as a point of departure for his own.
As in botany, Lamarck was attracted to the history and progressive development of meteorology. One might also say that he was concerned with a natural classification of meteorological phenomena. Finally, his theoretical considerations indicate an important thought pattern; he tried to explain all meteorological change as the result of one general cause (the moon) with irregularities produced by local circumstances.
Lamarck had not only a sense of the interrelation of fields but, within geology, a vision of the whole. He saw all of nature working according to similar principles: general natural tendencies producing gradual change over long periods of time, with local circumstances explaining the irregularities. His approach to geology was similar to that in other sciences: concern with the general principles and contempt for those who interested themselves too much with the specifics.
Although Lamarck’s geological views were not original, they were an important part of his conception of nature. His preoccupation with marine fossil shells had a decisive influence on his choice of geological theories. Since such shells had to have been laid down in water, he needed a theory to explain how this was possible. As in his meteorology, he used the moon as the main cause, in this case of a constant slow progression of the oceans around the globe. The main geological force was water acting according to uniformitarian principles over millions of years. The substances of the mineral kingdom were produced by the progressive disintegration of organic remains; water operated on these products to produce geological formations such as mountains.
Lamarck’s first public presentation of his theory of evolution was in his opening discourse for his course on invertebrates at the museum in 1800; it was published the following year at the beginning of his Système des animaux sans vertèbres. The evolutionary views sketched in the discourse leave much to be desired in terms of organization and explanation. They are, however, very much a part of a total view of nature, many aspects of which Lamarck had long accepted. Natural products consisted of living and nonliving things; in the two branches of living organisms, Lamarck pointed out the “degradations” in structural organization of the larger classificatory groupings or “masses” as one moved down the series from the most complex to the simplest. He indicated his lack of clarity about the new views he was proposing by using the term “complication” interchangeably with “degradation.” Nature, after having formed the simplest animals and plants directly, produced all others from them with the aid of time and circumstances.
In 1802 Lamarck dealt briefly with the upper limit of the animal series - man. He cautiously suggested that man was the result of the same processes that had produced all other living organisms. The major obstacle to the inclusion of man in the evolutionary process was his higher mental faculties. At the end of the Recherches, Lamarck offered a possible solution to this problem. Using his chemistry and comparative anatomy, he attempted to provide a materialistic explanation for the functioning of the nervous system. Following Haller’s distinction, he maintained that while all animals exhibit irritability, only those with a nervous system experience sensibility or feeling. The degree to which an animal possessed the latter faculties depended on the level of complexity of the nervous system and the movement of the nervous fluid, which was a modified form of fire, similar to electricity.
From his earliest scientific work, Lamarck was always more interested in the broad picture of nature and in general interrelations than in the details. While he did give scattered examples to support his theories, he was never systematic, always promising more evidence in a forthcoming work and never producing it. Lamarck felt that his theories were so obvious that they did not need extensive proof. In addition, he was paranoid with respect to the French scientific community because of their attitudes toward his work in chemistry; he was convinced that he never could win over his enemies, so he did not try. With all his work in botany and invertebrate zoology, he would have had abundant examples if he had wanted them. He always separated his theories and his detailed classificatory work. Although he spent years carefully determining, describing, and classifying species, in his evolutionary views he maintained that species were almost irrelevant, exceptions to the general natural law of evolution.
Quotations:
"What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated."
"Life, in a body whose order and state of affairs can make it manifest, is assuredly, as I have said, a real power that gives rise to numerous phenomena. This power has, however, neither goal nor intention. It can do only what it does; it is only a set of acting causes, not a particular being. I was the first to establish this truth at a time when life was still thought to be a principle, an archeia, a being of some sort."
Lamarck was a member of the Société Philomathique de Paris, the French Academy of Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Physical Characteristics: Lamarck’s health began to fail in 1809, when he developed eye problems; in 1818 he became completely blind but was able to continue his work by dictating to one of his daughters.
Lamarck’s personal life was marked by tragedy and poverty. He had three or four wives and eight children. In 1777 he began a liaison with Marie Rosalie Delaporte, marrying her, fifteen years and six children later, as she was dying. In 1793 he married Charlotte Victoire Reverdy, by whom he had two children; she died in 1797. The following year he married again; Julie Mallet died childless in 1819. There is some indication that he married for the fourth time, but no documents to support this can be found.
When he died in 1829, the family did not have enough money for his funeral and had to appeal to the Académie des Sciences for funds. His belongings, including his books and scientific collections, were sold at public auction; he left five children with no financial provisions. Of these, one son was deaf and another insane; his two daughters were single and without support. Only one child, Auguste, was financially successful as an engineer; he was the only one of the offspring to marry and have children.
