Not until forty years later do we meet the real and valiant precursor of Darwin, albeit a countryman of Buffon’s, but with a more profoundly philosophical mind and without his fear. This was Jean Baptiste Lamarck, born at Bazentin, France, 1744, and educated at the college of the Jesuits at Amiens. He served in the seven years war and then occupied himself studying medicine and science at Paris. He died, poor and blind, in 1829. Lamarck boldly proclaimed his unshakable faith in the doctrine of the transformation of species, and defended it against the strong tide of popular disfavor and the overwhelming opposition provoked by the antagonism of the great zoologist Cuvier. Cuvier’s opposition would have crushed a weaker man but Lamarck bore bravely up and calmly left his case for the future to decide. Cuvier held species to be constant, as was consonant with current and orthodox ideas. This made him a social favorite and the pet of the church, and honors were showered profusely upon him to the end of his days. Not so Lamarck; although born 25 years earlier, his theories were half a century in advance of Cuvier’s, and he paid the penalty that has so often overtaken those pioneers whose vision anticipated the future. “Attacked on all sides,” says his friend and colleague, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, “injured likewise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indignant to answer these cutting epigrams, submitted to the indignity with a sorrowful patience.... Lamarck lived a long while poor, blind, and forsaken, but not by me; I shall ever love and venerate him.” Another writer of that period exclaims, “Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors of their time.” As to Cuvier, the one stain on his career is his unworthy attitude toward his celebrated opponent and fellow worker. Lamarck had, with his usual generosity, aided and favored him when he first came to the Museum of Natural History at Paris, allowing him to hold, in addition to his own chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the chair of Molluscs, which was in Lamarck’s special field, where he had no equal, and which was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with great politeness and without mentioning his name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmonize science with the orthodox theology of his day by means of that theory of “cataclysms” which in spite of its being strenuously defended by so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories.