fter a
year's preparation, and at once established that great division of
animals into vertebrate and invertebrate, which science has ever since
recognized.

"Dividing the vertebrate animals--as Linnaeus had already divided
them--into mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, he divided the
invertebrates into molluscs, insects, worms, echinoderms, and polyps. In
1799 he separated the crustacea from the insects, with which they had
been classed hitherto; in 1800 he established the arachnids as a class
distinct from the insects; in 1802 that of the annelids, a subdivision
of the worms, and that of the radiata as distinct from the polyps. Time
has approved the wisdom of these divisions, founded all of them upon the
organic type of the creatures themselves--that is to say, upon the
rational method introduced into zoology by Cuvier, Lamarck, and Geoffroy
St. Hilaire.

"This introduction being devoted only to Lamarck's labours as a
naturalist, we will pass over certain works in which he treats of
physics and chemistry. These attempts--errors of a powerful mind which
thought itself able by the help of pure reason to establish truths which
rest only upon experience--attempts, moreover, which were some of them
but resuscitations of exploded theories, such as that of
'phlogistic'--had not even the honour of being refuted: they did not
deserve to be so, and should be a warning to all those who would write
upon a subject without the necessary practical knowledge.

. . . . . .

"At the beginning of this century there was not yet any such science as
geology. People observed but little, and in lieu of observation made
theories to embrace the entire globe. Lamarck made his in 1802, and
twenty-three years later the judicious Cuvier still yielded to the
prevailing custom in publishing his 'Discoveries on the Earth's
Revolutions.'

"Lamarck's merit was to have discovered that there had been no
catastrophes, but that the gradual action of forces during thousands of
ages accounted for the changes observable upon the face of the earth,
better than any sudden and violent perturbations. 'Nature,' he writes,
'has no difficulty on the score of time; she has it always at command;
it is with her a boundless space in which she has room for the greatest
as for the smallest operations.'"

Here we must not forget Buffon's fine passage, "Nature's great workman
is Time," &c. See page 103.

"Lamarck," continues M. Martins, "was the first to di