Animal life, so immeasurably higher than vegetable forms, with its highly complex physiological functions and varied means of reproduction, and the relations of its forms to each other and to the world around, affords facts for evolution which were novel to Lamarck, the descriptive botanist.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF LAMARCK.

REAR VIEW, FROM THE WEST] [Illustration: MAISON DE BUFFON, IN WHICH LAMARCK LIVED IN PARIS.
1793-1829] In accordance with the rules of the Museum, which required that all the professors should be lodged within the limits of the Jardin, the choice of lodgings being given to the oldest professors, Lamarck, at the time of his appointment, took up his abode in the house now known as the Maison de Buffon, situated on the opposite side of the Jardin des Plantes from the house afterwards inhabited by Cuvier, and in the angle between the Galerie de Zoologie and the Museum library.[37] With little doubt the windows of his study, where his earlier addresses, the _Recherches sur l'Organisation des Corps Vivans_, and the _Philosophie Zoologique_, were probably written, looked out upon what is now the court on the westerly side of the house, that facing the Rue Geoffroy St.Hilaire.
At the time of his entering on his duties as professor of zooelogy, Lamarck was in his fiftieth year.

He had married twice and was the father of six children, and without fortune.

He married for a third, and afterwards for a fourth time, and in all, seven children were born to him, as in the year (1794) the minute referring to his request for an indemnity states: "Il est charge de sept enfans dont un est sur les vaisseaux de la Republique." Another son was an artist, as shown by the records of the Assembly of the Museum for September 23, 1814, when he asked for a chamber in the lodgings of Thouin, for the use of his son, "_peintre_." Geoffroy St.Hilaire, in 1829, spoke of one of his sons, M.Auguste de Lamarck, as a skilful and highly esteemed engineer of Ponts-et-Chaussees, then advantageously situated.
But man cannot live by scientific researches and philosophic meditations alone.

The history of Lamarck's life is painful from beginning to end.
With his large family and slender salary he was never free from carking cares and want.