Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

(1744 - 1829)

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck joined the French army at seventeen, but an injury forced him to leave the service. When revolutionaries threatened the Royal Gardens in Paris, Lamarck suggested the name be changed to Jardin des Plantes. Previously a botanist at the gardens’ museum and research institute, he was appointed professor of zoology and turned his attention to invertebrates; it was among invertebrates, he said, those animals “most numerous in nature, the most prompt and easy to regenerate themselves, that we should seek the most instructive facts bearing on the course of nature.”