This little village is situated in Picardy, or what is now the Department of the Somme, in the Arrondissement de Peronne, Canton d'Albert, a little more than four miles from Albert, between this town and Bapaume, and near Longueval, the nearest post-office to Bazentin.

The village of Bazentin-le-Grand, composed of a few more houses than its sister hamlet, is seen half a mile to the southeast, shaded by the little forest such as borders nearly every town and village in this region.

The two hamlets are pleasantly situated in a richly cultivated country, on the chalk uplands or downs of Picardy, amid broad acres of wheat and barley variegated with poppies and the purple cornflower, and with roadsides shaded by tall poplars.
The peasants to the number of 251 compose the diminishing population.
There were 356 in 1880, or about that date.

The silence of the single little street, with its one-storied, thatched or tiled cottages, is at infrequent intervals broken by an elderly dame in her _sabots_, or by a creaking, rickety village cart driven by a farmer-boy in blouse and hob-nailed shoes.

The largest inhabited building is the _mairie_, a modern structure, at one end of which is the village school, where fifteen or twenty urchins enjoy the instructions of the worthy teacher.
A stone church, built in 1774, and somewhat larger than the needs of the hamlet at present require, raises its tower over the quiet scene.
Our pilgrimage to Bazentin had for its object the discovery of the birthplace of Lamarck, of which we could obtain no information in Paris.
Our guide from Albert took us to the _mairie_, and it was with no little satisfaction that we learned from the excellent village teacher, M.Duval, that the house in which the great naturalist was born was still standing, and but a few steps away, in the rear of the church and of the _mairie_.