After the peace, the regiment was sent to Monaco. There it happened that one of his comrades playfully lifted him by the head, and to this it was imputed that he was seized with disease of the glands of the neck, so severe as to necessitιfe grave surgical interference, and put a stop to his military career.

The courage of Lamarck, so early exhibited, was in future to be shown by the maintenance of his opinions in the absence of any friendly support, and by fortitude amid many adversities; while his activity was to be displayed, not only in manifold speculation, but in copious and varied scientific work. He went to Paris and began the study of medicine, supporting himself by working in a banker’s office. He early became interested in meteorology and in physical and chemical speculations of a chimerical kind, but happily threw his main strength into botany, and in 1778 published his Flore française, a work in which by a dichotomous system of contrasting characters he enabled the student with facility to determine species. This work, which went through several editions and long kept the field, gained for its author immediate popularity as well as the honour of admission to the Academy of Sciences.

In 1781 and 1782, under the title of botanist to the king, an appointment obtained for him by Buffon, whose son accompanied him, he travelled through various countries of Europe, extending his knowledge of natural history; and on his return he began those elaborate contributions to botany on which his reputation in that science principally rests, namely, the Dictionnaire de Botanique and the Illustrations de Genres, voluminous works contributed to the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1785). In 1793, when he was already forty-nine years of age, in consequence of changes in the organization of the natural history department at the Jardin du Roi, where he had held a botanical appointment since 1788, Lamarck was presented to a zoological chair, and called on to lecture on the Insecta and Vermes of Linnaeus, the animals for which he introduced the term Invertebrata, still employed. Thus driven, comparatively late in life, to devote his principal attention to zoology instead of botany, he had the misfortune soon after to suffer from impaired vision; and the malady progressing resulted subsequently in total blindness. Yet his greatest zoological work, the Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres, was published from 1815 to 1822, with the assistance, in the last two volumes, of his eldest daughter and of M. Latreille. A volume of plates of the fossil shells of the neighbourhood of Paris was collected in 1823 from his memoirs in the Annales des Museum. The later years of his blind old age were spent in straitened circumstances and accumulating infirmities, solaced, however, by the devotion of bis family, and particularly of his eldest daughter, of whom Cuvier records that she never left the house from the time that he was confined to his room. He died 18th December 1829.

The character of Lamarck as a naturalist is remarkable alike for its excellences and its defects. His excellences were width of scope, fertility of ideas, and a pre-eminent faculty of precise description, arising not only from a singularly terse style, but from a clear insight into both the distinctive features and the resemblances of forms. That part of his zoological work which still finds a large and important place in the science of the present day, and constitutes his solid claim to the highest honour as a zoologist, is to be found in his extensive and detailed labours in the departments of living and fossil Invertebrata. His endeavours at classification of the great groups were necessarily defective on account of the imperfect knowledge possessed in his time in regard to many of them, e.g., echinoderms, ascidians, and intestinal worms; yet they are not without interest, particularly on account of the comprehensive attempt to unite in one great division as Articulata all those groups that appeared to present a segmented construction. Moreover, Lamarck was the first to distinguish vertebrate from invertebrate animals by the presence of a vertebral column, and among the Invertebrata to found the groups Crustacea, Arαchnida, and Annelida. In 1785 (Hist. de l ’ Acad.) he evinced his appreciation of the necessity of natural orders in botany by an attempt at the classification of plants, interesting, though crude and falling immeasurably short of the system which grew in the hands of his intimate friend Jussieu. The problem of taxonomy has never been put more philosophically than he subsequently put it in his Animaux sans Vertèbres :— “What arrangement must be given to the general distribution of animals to make it conformable to the order of nature in the production of these beings 1”

The most prominent defect in Lamarck must be admitted, quite apart from all consideration of the famous hypothesis which bears his name, to have been want of control in speculation. Doubtless the speculative tendency furnished a powerful incentive to work, but it outran the legitimate deductions from observation, and led him into the production of volumes of worthless chemistry without experimental basis, as well as into spending much time on fruitless meteorological predictions.’ His Annuaires Météorologiques were published yearly from 1800 to 1810, and were not discontinued until after an unnecessarily public and brutal tirade from Napoleon, administered on the occasion of being presented with one of his works on natural history.

To the general reader the name of Lamarck is chiefly interesting on account of his theory of the origin of life and of the diversities of animal forms. The idea, which appears to have been favoured by Buffon before him, that species were not through all time unalterable, and that the more complex might have been developed from pre-existent simpler forms, became with Lamarck a belief or, as he imagined a demonstration. Spontaneous generation, he considered, might be easily conceived as resulting from such agencies as heat and electricity causing in small gelatinous bodies an utricular structure, and inducing a “singular tension,” a kind of “éréthisme” or “orgasme”; and, having thus accounted for the first appearance of life, he explained the whole organization of animals and formation of different organs by four laws :—

“1. Life by its proper forces tends continually to increase the volume of every body possessing it, and to enlarge its parts, up to a limit which it brings about.

“2. The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the supervention of a new want (besoin) continuing to make itself felt, and a new movement which this want gives birth to and encourages.

“3. The development of organs and their force of action are constantly in ratio to the employment of these organs.

“4. All which has been acquired, laid down, or changed in the organization of individuals in the course of their life is conserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which proceed from those which have undergone those changes.”

It is the second law which has been principally associated with Lamarck’s name, and is often referred to as his hypothesis of the evolution of organs in animals by appetence or longing, although Lamarck does not teach that the animal’s desires affect its conformation directly, but that altered wants lead to altered habits, which result in the formation of new organs as well as in modification, growth, or dwindling of those previously existing. Thus, he suggests that, ruminants being pursued by carnivora, their legs have grown slender; and, their legs being only fit for support, while their jaws are weak, they have made attack with the crown of the head, and the determination of fluids thither has led to the growth of horns. So also the stretching of the giraffe’s neck to reach the foliage he supposes to have led to its elongation; and the kangaroo, sitting upright to support the young in its pouch, he imagines to have had its fore-limbs dwarfed by disuse, and its hind legs and tail exaggerated by using them in leaping. The length to which he carried such notions can be fairly estimated by the illustration which, long after the publication of his Philosophic Zoolpgiquc, he selected in the introduction to the Hist. Nat. des Anim. sans Vert. ‘ ‘ I conceive that a gasteropod mollusc, which, as it crawls along, finds the need of touching the bodies in front of it, makes efforts to touch those bodies with some of the foremost parts of its head, and sends to these every time quantities of nervous fluids, as well as other liquids. I conceive, I say, that it must result from this reiterated afflux towards the points in question that the nerves which abut at these points will, by slow degrees, be extended. Now, as in the same circumstances other fluids of the animal flow also to the same places, and especially nourishing fluids, it must follow that two or more tentacles will appear and develop insensibly in those circumstances on the points referred to.”

However absurd this may seem, it must be admitted that, unlimited time having been once granted for organs to be developed in series of generations, the objections to their being formed in the way here imagined are only such as equally apply to the theory of their origin by natural selection. Thus, for example, neither theory considers that it has to deal, not with crude heaps of mere functional organs, but with exquisitely orderly forms, nor accounts for the symmetrical first appearance of parts or for sex; nor, though Lamarck tried hard, has he or any later writer reduced to physical law the rise of consciousness in association with structures wlιich in their physical relations are mere mechanisms capable of reflex actions.

In judging the reasonableness of the second law of Lamarck as compared with more modern and now widely received theories, it must be observed that it is only an extension of his third law; and that third law is a fact. The strengthening of the blacksmith’s arm by use is proverbially notorious. It is, therefore, only the sufficiency of the Lamarckian hypothesis to explain the first commencement of new organs which is in question, if evolution by the mere operation of forces acting in the inorganic world be granted; and surely the Darwinian theory is equally helpless to account for the boginnings of a new organ, while it demands as imperatively that every stage in the assumed hereditary development of an organ must have been useful.

Furthermore, to no writer more recent than Lamarck can be attributed the credit of first pointing attention to the repetition of acquired variations in the progeny, or the idea of weaving that fact into a theory of the origin of species. His words are ^“Everything which nature has caused individuals to acquire or lose by the influence of the circumstances to which their race is long exposed, and consequently by the influence of the predominant employment of such organ, or its constant disuse, she preserves by generation to the new individuals proceeding from them, provided that the changes are common to the two sexes, or to those which have produced these new individuals” (Phil. Zook, i. 235). It is interesting to note in this passage that he hesitated to believe that peculiarities could become permanent unless possessed by both parents.

Notwithstanding his attempt to e÷olve all vital action from the forces at work in the inorganic world, Lamarck made a broad dis tinction between the “power of life,” to which he attributed the production of ‘ ‘ a real progression in the composition of the organization of animals,” and the modifying effects of external circumstances. The existence of such a progression cannot now be doubted, and constitutes evolution in the only sense in which it is universally admitted. Lamarck, equally with Darwin, teaches the more speculative doctrine that the complex forms are descended from simpler ancestors. In the modus operandi by which they hold this to have been accomplished both have admitted the action of a variety of modifying circumstances. Lamarck gave great importance to the influence of new wants acting indirectly by stimulating growth and use. Darwin has given like importance to the effects of accidental variations acting indirectly by giving advantage in the struggle for existence. The speculative writings of Darwin have, however, been interwoven λvith a vast number of beautiful experiments and observations bearing on his speculations, though by no means proving his theory of evolution; while the speculations of Lamarck lie apart from his wonderful descriptive labours, unrelieved by intermixture with other matters capable of attracting the numerous class who, provided they have new facts set before them, are not careful to limit themselves to the conclusions strictly deducible therefrom. But those who read the Philosophie Zoologique will find how many truths often supposed to be far more modern are stated with abundant clearness in its pages.

The remaining story of Lamartine’s life is somewhat melancholy. He had never been a rich man, nor had he been a saving one, and during his period of popularity and office he had incurred great expenses. He now set to work to repair his fortune by unremitting literary labour. He brought out in the Presse a series of Confidences, and somewhat later a kind of autobiography, entitled Raphael, which treated his own experiences in romantic fashion. He began and finished several historical works of more or less importance, the History of the Revolution of 1848, The History of the Restoration, The History of Turkey, The History of Russia, besides a very large number of small biographical and miscellaneous works. In 1858 a subscription was opened for his benefit. Two years afterwards, following the example of Chateaubriand, he supervised an elaborate edition of his own works in forty-one volumes. This occupied five years, and while he was engaged on it his wife died (1863). He was now a man of more than seventy years old; his powers had deserted him, and even if they had not the public taste had entirely changed, and was no longer disposed to welcome or enjoy his sentimental fashion of handling prose and poetry. His efforts had not succeeded in placing him in a position of comfort and independence; and at last, in 1867, the Government of the empire (from which he had perforce stood aloof, though he never considered it necessary to adopt the active protesting attitude of Quinet and Victor Hugo) came forward to his assistance, a vote of twenty thousand pounds being proposed in April of that year for his benefit by M. Emile Ollivier. In no other country than France would this have been anything but creditable to both parties, for Lamartine, both as a distinguished man of letters and as a past servant of the state, had every claim to the bounty of his country. But the bitter party feeling which animated the later years of the reign of Napoleon III. made the grant something of a party matter, and Lamartine was reproached for accepting it by the extreme republicans and irreconcilables. He did not enjoy it long, dying, as has been said, on the 1st of March 1869, two years before the collapse of the empire.

As a statesman Lamartine was placed during his brief tenure of office in a position from which it would have been almost impossible for any man who was not prepared and able to play the dictator to emerge with credit. At no time in history, not even in the great revolution of sixty years earlier, were unpractical crotchets so rife in the heads of men as in 1848, and at no time was there such an absence of what may be called backbone in a nation as then in France. But Lamartine could hardly have guided the ship of state safely even in much calmer weather. Personally he was amiable and even estimable, the chief fault of his character being vanity and an incurable tendency towards theatrical elΓect, which makes his travels, memoirs, and other personal records as well as his historical works radically untrustworthy. Nor does it appear that he had any settled political ideas. He was first an ardent legitimist, then a liberal royalist, then a constitutionalist of an indefinite type, then a republican; and it does not appear that any of these 1)hases was the result of reasoned conviction, but rather of a vague ûnd of sentiment and of the contagion of popular and prevalent ideas. In regard to money he was entirely disinterested, never obtaining or seeking any lucrative office. That he was quite so disinterested in the matter of personal vanity and ambition cannot perhaps be safely affirmed. He did good by moderating the revolutionary and destructive ardour of the Parisian populace in 1848; but he had been perhaps more responsible than any other single person for bringing about the events of that year by the vague and frothy republican declamation of his Histoire des Girondins. Altogether little more can be said of his political career than that he was the most striking if not the most successful instance of the French system, which has prevailed since the downfall of the first empire, of making literary success a direct road to political eminence.

More must be said of his literary position. Lamartine had the advantage of coming at a time when the literary field, at least in the departments of belles lettres, was almost empty. The feeble school of descriptive writers, epic poets of the extreme decadence, fabulists, and miscellaneous verse-makers which the empire had nourished could satisfy no one, though its members still continued with unceasing fidelity to copy themselves and their models. Madame de Stael was dead; Chateaubriand, though alive, was something of a classic, and had not effected a full revolution. Lamartine did not himself go the complete length of the romantic revival, but he went far in that direction. He availed himself of the reviving interest in legitimism and Catholicism which was represented by Bonald and Joseph <le Maistre, of the nature worship of Rousseau and Bernardin de St Pierre, of the sentimentalism of Madame de Stael, of the mediaevalism and the romance of Chateaubriand and Scott, of the maladie du siècle of Chateaubriand and Byron. Perhaps if his matter be very closely analysed it will be found that he added hardly anything of his own. But if the parts of the mixture were like other things the mixture itself was not. It seemed indeed to the immediate generation so original that tradition has it that the Méditations were refused by a publisher because they were in none of the accepted styles. They appeared, as has been said, in 1820, that is to say, when Lamartine was nearly thirty years old. The best of them and the best thing that Lamartine ever did is the famous Lac, describing his return to the little mountain tarn of Le Bourget after the death of his mistress, with whom he had visited it in other days. The verse is exquisitely harmonious, the sentiments conventional but refined and delicate, the imagery well chosen and gracefully expressed. There is indeed an unquestionable want of vigour, but to readers of that day the want of vigour was entirely compensated by the presence of freshness and grace. Lamartine’s chief misfortune in poetry was that not only was his note a somewhat weak one, but that he could strike but one. The four volumes of the Méditations, the Harmonies, and the Recueillements, which contained the prime of his verse, are perhaps the most monotonous reading to be found anywhere in work of equal bulk by a poet of equal talent. They contain nothing but meditative lyrical pieces, almost any one of which is typical of the whole, though there is of course considerable variation of merit. The two narrative poems which succeeded the early lyrics, Jocelyn and the Chute d , un Ange, were, according to Lamartine’s original plan, parts of a vast ‘ ‘ Epic of the Ages,” some further fragments of which survive, especially one of not a little merit which was published four years after the author’s death in company with some youthful attempts at the classical tragedy and a few miscellanea. Jocelyn had at one time more popularity in England than most French verse. La Chute d'un Ange, in which the Byronic influence is more obvious than in any other of Lamartine’s works, is more ambitious in theme and less regulated by scrupulous conditions of delicacy in handling than most of its author’s poetry. It does, however, little more than prove that such audacities were not for him.

As a prose writer Lamartine was, as may be seen from what has been said (and many of his works have not been mentioned), very fertile. His characteristics in his prose fiction and descriptive work are not very different from those of his poetry. He is always and everywhere sentimental, though very frequently, as in his shorter prose tales (The Stone Mason of St Point, Graziella, &c. ), he is graceful as well as sentimental. In his histories, the style being one for which he was radically unfitted, the effect is worse. It has been hinted that Lamartine’s personal narratives are doubtfully trustworthy; indeed with regard to his Eastern travels some of the episodes were stigmatized as mere inventions by persons who had every reason to be well informed and none to bear false witness. In his histories proper the special motive for embellishment—falsification would be too rough a word—for the most part disappears, but the habit of inaccuracy remains. Lamartine as an historian belongs exclusively to the rhetorical school as distinguished from the philosophical on the one hand and the documentary on the other.

It is not surprising when these characteristics of Lamartine’s work are appreciated, to find that his fame has declined with singular rapidity in France. As a poet indeed he had lost his reputation many years before he died. He was entirely eclipsed by the brilliant and vigorous school who succeeded him with Victor Hugo at their head. It is possible that the Chute d’un Ange was an effort to compete with them on their own ground; if so, it was an entire failure. Lamartine’s power of initiative in poetry was very small, and the range of poetic ground which he could cover strictly limited. He did not attempt the great task of the day, the freeing of the Alexandrine from the restraints imposed upon it, and the devising or reviving of new lyric metres to refresh and invigorate French poetic style. He could only carry the picturesque sentimentalism of Rousseau, Bernardin de St Pierre, and Chateaubriand a little further, and clothe it in language and verse a little less antiquated than that of Chênedollé and Millevoye. He has been said to be a French Cowper, and the parallel holds good in respect of versification and of his relative position to the more daringly innovating school that followed, though not in respect of individual peculiarities. Lamartine in short occupied a kind of half-way house between the 18th century and the Romantic movement, and he never got any further. When a living English critic questioned·his importance in conversation with Sainte-Beuve, the answer was, “He is important to us,” and it was a true answer; but his importance is now chiefly historical, even to Frenchmen.

The already mentioned edition is the most complete one of Lamartine, but there are many issues of his separate works. Since his death, besides the poems already mentioned, some Mémoires Inédits of his youth have been published, and also two volumes of correspondence.