, with nine hundred engravings. Only a botanist can form any
idea of the research in collections, gardens, and books, which such a
work must have involved. But Lamarck's activity was inexhaustible.
Sonnerat returned from India in 1781 with a very large number of dried
plants; no one except Lamarck thought it worth while to inspect them,
and Sonnerat, charmed with his enthusiasm, gave him the whole
magnificent collection.

"In spite, however, of his incessant toil, Lamarck's position continued
to be most precarious. He lived by his pen, as a publisher's hack, and
it was with difficulty that he obtained even the poorly paid post of
keeper of the king's cabinet of dried plants. Like most other
naturalists he had thus to contend with incessant difficulties during a
period of fifteen years.

"At length fortune bettered his condition while changing the direction
of his labours. France was now under the Convention; what Carnot had
done for the army Lakanal undertook to do for the natural sciences. At
his suggestion a museum of natural history was established. Professors
had been found for all the chairs save that of Zoology; but in that time
of enthusiasm, so different from the present, France could find men of
war and men of science wherever and whenever she had need of them.
Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire was twenty-one years old, and was engaged
in the study of mineralogy under Hauey. Daubenton said to him, 'I will
undertake the responsibility for your inexperience. I have a father's
authority over you. Take this professorship, and let us one day say that
you have made zoology a French science.' Geoffroy accepted, and
undertook the higher animals. Lakanal knew that a single professor could
not suffice for the task of arranging the collections of the entire
animal kingdom, and as Geoffroy was to class the vertebrate animals
only, there remained the invertebrata--that is to say, insects,
molluscs, worms, zoophytes--in a word, what was then the chaos of the
unknown. 'Lamarck,' says M. Michelet, 'accepted the unknown.' He had
devoted some attention to the study of shells with Bruguieres, but he
had still everything to learn, or I should perhaps say rather,
everything to create in that unexplored territory into which Linnaeus had
declined to enter, and into which he had thus introduced none of the
order he had so well known how to establish among the higher animals.

"Lamarck began his course of lectures at the museum in 1794, a