He led a retired life.

His youth was tinged with romance, and during the last decade of his life he was blind.

He manfully and patiently bore adverse criticisms, ridicule, forgetfulness, and inappreciation, while, so far from renouncing his theoretical views, he tenaciously clung to them to his dying day.
The biography of such a character is replete with interest, and the memory of his unselfish and fruitful devotion to science should be forever cherished.

His life was also notable for the fact that after his fiftieth year he took up and mastered a new science; and at a period when many students of literature and science cease to be productive and rest from their labors, he accomplished the best work of his life--work which has given him lasting fame as a systematist and as a philosophic biologist.

Moreover, Lamarckism comprises the fundamental principles of evolution, and will always have to be taken into consideration in accounting for the origin, not only of species, but especially of the higher groups, such as orders, classes, and phyla.
This striking personage in the history of biological science, who has made such an ineffaceable impression on the philosophy of biology, certainly demands more than a brief _eloge_ to keep alive his memory.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, was born August 1, 1744, at Bazentin-le-Petit.