An immense work from the labor it cost, and truly original in its execution....
The second treatise, entitled _Illustration des Genres_, presents in the order of the sexual system the figures and the details of all the genera known in botany, and with a concise exposition of the generic characters and of the species known.

This work, unique of its kind, already contains six hundred plates executed by the best artists, and will comprise nine hundred.

Also for more than ten years the citizen Lamarck has employed in Paris a great number of artists.

Moreover, he has kept running three separate presses for different works, all relating to natural history." Cuvier in his _Eloge_ also adds: "It is astonishing that M.de Lamarck, who hitherto had been studying botany as an amateur, was able so rapidly to qualify himself to produce so extensive a work, in which the rarest plants were described.

It is because, from the moment he undertook it, with all the enthusiasm of his nature, he collected them from the gardens and examined them in all the available herbaria; passing the days at the houses of the botanists he knew, but chiefly at the home of M.
de Jussieu, in that home where for more than a century a scientific hospitality welcomed with equal kindness every one who was interested in the delightful study of botany.