of Paris possibly near
Mont Valerien? He must have been about twenty-two years old when he met
Rousseau and began to study botany seriously. His _Flore Francaise_
appeared in 1778, when he was thirty-four years old. Rousseau, at the
end of his checkered life, from 1770 to 1778, lived in Paris. He often
botanized in the suburbs; and Mr. Morley, in his _Rousseau_, says that
"one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valerien in the sunset"
(p. 436). Rousseau died in Paris in 1778. That Rousseau expressed
himself vaguely in favor of evolution is stated by Isidore Geoffroy
St. Hilaire, who quotes a "_Phrase, malheureusement un peu ambigue, qui
semble montrer, dans se grand ecrivain, un partisan de plus de la
variabilite du type_." (_Resume des Vues sur l'espece organique_, p. 18,
Paris, 1889.) The passage is quoted in Geoffroy's _Histoire Naturelle
Generale des Regnes organiques_, ii., ch. I., p. 271. I have been unable
to verify this quotation.
[12] _Lecon d'Ouverture du Cours de l'Evolution des Etres organises._
Paris, 1888.
[13] _Dictionnaire des Termes de la Botanique._ Art. APHRODITE.
[14] _Discours sur l'Origine et les Fondements de l'Inegalite parmi les
Hommes._ 1754.
[15] Since 1742, the keeper and demonstrator of the Cabinet, who shared
with Thouin, the chief gardener, the care of the Royal Gardens.
Daubenton was at that time the leading anatomist of France, and after
Buffon's death he gathered around him all the scientific men who
demanded the transformation of the superannuated and incomplete Jardin
du Roi, and perhaps initiated the movement which resulted five years
later in the creation of the present Museum of Natural History. (Hamy,
_l. c._, p. 12.)
[16] De Mortillet (_Lamarck. Par un Groupe de Transformistes_, p. 11)
states that Lamarck was elected to the Academy at the age of thirty; but
as he was born in 1744, and the election took place in 1779, he must
have been thirty-five years of age.
[17] Cuvier's _Eloge_, p. viii.; also _Revue biographique de la Societe
Malacologique_, p. 67.
[18] See letters to the Committee of Public Instruction.
[19] Cuvier's _Eloge_, p. viii; also Bourguignat in _Revue biog. Soc.
Malacologique_, p. 67.
[20] He received no remuneration for this service. As was afterwards
stated in the National Archives, _Etat des personnes attachees au Museum
National d'Histoire Naturelle a l'epoque du messidor an II de la
Republique_, he "sent to this establishment seed
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