Content area
Full text
PART ONE: The Spirit of Lamarck's System
I. The Making and Breaking of a Reputation On the twenty-first day of the auspiciously named month of Floreal (flowering), in the spring of the year 8 on the French revolutionary calendar (1800 to the rest of the Western world), the former Chevalier (knight) but now Citoyen (citizen) Lamarck delivered the opening lecture for his annual course on zoology at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris-and changed the science of biology forever by presenting the first public account of his theory of evolution. Lamarck then published this short discourse in 1801, as the first part of his treatise on invertebrate animals, Systeme des animaux sans vertebres (System of invertebrate animals).
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) had enjoyed a distinguished career in botany when, just short of his fiftieth birthday, he became a professor of "insects, worms, and microscopic animals" at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, newly constituted by the Revolutionary government in 1793. Lamarck would later coin the term invertebrate for his assigned organisms. (In 1802 he also introduced the word biology for the entire discipline.) But his original title followed Linnaeus's designation of all spineless animals as either insects or worms, a Procrustean scheme that Lamarck would soon alter. Lamarck had been an avid shell collector and student of mollusks (then classified within Linnaeus's large and heterogeneous category of Vermes, or worms)-qualifications deemed sufficient for his shift from botany.
Lamarck fully repaid the confidence invested in his general biological abilities by publishing distinguished works in the taxonomy of invertebrates throughout the remainder of his career, culminating in the seven volumes of his comprehensive Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertebres (Natural history of invertebrate animals), published between 1815 and 1822. At the same time, he constantly refined and expanded his evolutionary views, extending his introductory discourse of 1800 into a full book in 1802 (Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivants, or "Research on the organization of living beings"); then into his magnum opus and most famous work in 1809, the two-volume Philosophie zoologique (Zoological philosophy); and finally into a statement for the long opening section, published in 1815, of his great treatise on invertebrates.
The outlines of such a career might seem to imply continuing growth of prestige, from an initial...