[Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution by Alpheus Spring Packard]@TWC D-Link book
Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution

CHAPTER IV
1/21


PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOeLOGY AT THE MUSEUM Lamarck's career as a botanist comprised about twenty-five years.

We now come to the third stage of his life--Lamarck the zooelogist and evolutionist.

He was in his fiftieth year when he assumed the duties of his professorship of the zooelogy of the invertebrate animals; and at a period when many men desire rest and freedom from responsibility, with the vigor of an intellectual giant Lamarck took upon his shoulders new labors in an untrodden field both in pure science and philosophic thought.
It was now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in October until the end of the year, was in the deadliest throes of revolution.

The dull thud of the guillotine, placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers in the Museum, for sansculottism in its most aggressive and hideous forms raged not far from the Jardin des Plantes, then just on the border of the densest part of the Paris of the first Revolution.

Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, was guillotined some months later.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books