Bourguin adds, however: "_Mais il les dut moins a ses merites qu'aux petits passions de la science officielle._ The illustrious Buffon, who was at the same time a very great lord at court, was jealous of Linne.

He could not endure having any one compare his brilliant and eloquent word-pictures of animals with the cold and methodical descriptions of the celebrated Swedish naturalist.

So he attempted to combat him in another field--botany.

For this reason he encouraged and pushed Lamarck into notice, who, as the popularizer of the system of classification into natural families, seemed to him to oppose the development of the arrangement of Linne." Lamarck's style was never a highly finished one, and his incipient essays seemed faulty to Buffon, who took so much pains to write all his works in elegant and pure French.

So he begged the Abbe Hauey to review the literary form of Lamarck's works.
Here it might be said that Lamarck's is the philosophic style; often animated, clear, and pure, it at times, however, becomes prolix and tedious, owing to occasional repetition.
But after all it can easily be understood that the discipline of his botanical studies, the friendship manifested for him by Buffon, then so influential and popular, the relations Lamarck had with Jussieu, Hauey, and the zooelogists of the Jardin du Roi, were all important factors in Lamarck's success in life, a success not without terrible drawbacks, and to the full fruition of which he did not in his own life attain..