Lamarck’s first book Flore Francaise was published in three volumes in 1778, with the
support of a French naturalist – Georges Louis Buffon. Botany had become universally
popular then, and a cross-section of public greeted his Flore Francaise as a useful manual
for identification of different flowers. This volume brought him great acclaim, and
remained a standard work on the subject for many years. It did not adhere slavishly to the
methods of the Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnecus and won him appointment to the Academy
of Science, which at that time was restricted to 42 members. This was in preference to
scientists with much longer careers behind them. Buffon had also been the influential
factor for his appointment at the Academy.
 Lamarck was one of the pioneers of the modern
concept of the museum collection, an array of objects whose arrangement constitutes a
classification under institutional sponsorship, maintained and kept up to date by
specialists. When the National Museum of Natural History – Jardin des Plantes was
founded in 1793, he was placed in charge of invertebrates – a field he was far from
specialized. Despite lack of expertise, Lamarck committed himself to learning everything
he could about invertebrates. In fact, he was the one who coined the term
‘invertebrate’ and categorized and present the museum’s vast and
disorganized collection appropriately.
He discovered a system of
segregating or classifying and sub-dividing the living organisms according to type, and
established the standard for later systems of invertebrate taxonomy. He, then began
formulating new ideas about the relationships between animals, and then about the
transmutation of species into new ones.
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In 1800, he announced a revision of the classification of lower class of animals which were left unclassified by Linnecus. His first major work on invertebrates, Systeme des ammaux sans vertebraes, on tablo general des classes was published in 1801. It reflected current research, most notably the anatomical studies of Cuvier, and established the basic arrangement for these animals that secured its status as a guide to inquiry throughout the 19th century and is still largely accepted. |
The systematic study of
invertebrates climaxed with the publication of his life’s work – Historie
Naturelle des Animaux sans vertebraes – Natural History of Invertebrate Animals. The
first volume of this impressive seven volume work was published in 1815 and the second in
1822. It was a complete indication of his proposal to establish museum collections as
basis for revisionary work in systematic biology.
Lamarck’s works were not
restricted to biology alone. By the end of the 18th century, he had learned
enough of chemistry and physiology to persuade the most acute inquirers that new
understandings might be attained through patient search for clues to fundamental
relationships. Lamarck feared that science would remain confined to a domain of a few
specialists.
 So, he conceived a plan for a series of treatises,
elaborating a unified view of physical processes like chemistry, geology, climate and
life. The first of these was a two volume speculative treatment of matter and energy,
Recherches sur les causes des principaun faits physiques et particularement sur celles de
la combustion (1794 Research on the causes of principal Physical Facts and particularly
those of Combustion) followed by Refutation de la throne pneumatique, on de la nowelle
doctrine des chimistes modernes (1796 : Refutation of the Pneumatic Theory or of the New
Doctrine for Modern Chemists) in which he opposed his own theory of combustion to the
views of Lavoisier and Count Antoine de Fourcroy. Neither of Lamarck’s works was
calculated to the mood of caution then coming to govern most serious scientific work, and
he did not know how to dramatize his views to gain wider audiences. Perhaps this failing
on his part may have caused a breech that tend to make a person unpopular.
His Hydrogeologie (1802 :
Hydrogeology) offered a history of the earth interpreted as a series of inundations by a
global sea, each accompanied by organic deposits building up the continents. Lamarck
recognized that the type of fossil occurring in a deposit would permit inferences as to
whether the deposit had been built up as deep-marine sediments or as coastal deposits. The
book also revealed his extraordinary perception of the vastness of geological time and
space.
In 1809, he published his most
famous work – Philosophie Zoologique. This volume describes his theory of
transmutation. Lamarck’s evolutionism became known as The Inheritance of Acquired
Characteristics, which described the means by which the structure of an organism got
altered over generations.  |
