by safe ways, and under the shelter of what they could get. This act of great courage was told to the Marshal de Broglie, and he made Lamarck an officer on the spot. Then he was made lieutenant. But such a brilliant commencement was not to have a military termination, and a miserable accident gave a new direction to his life. When Lamarck, after the war, was in garrison at Monaco, one of his fellow-officers lifted him up by the head, and the result was to injure his neck. He nearly died from the effects of this folly, and was saved by a distinguished surgeon at Paris, M. Tenon, whose operation left Lamarck with life, and a fearfully scarred neck, and unable to follow his profession. The treatment occupied a whole year, and he was so poor, that one of his biographers states, rather cruelly, that his necessary solitude gave him plenty of time for meditation. It is remarkable that although Lamarck cared more for the army than for his studies at college he really worked there, and what he learned was of great use to him in his future career. His hours of weary suffering were sometimes employed in studying the clouds, and in noticing their different shapes and appearances. He got by this means some vague ideas of meteorology. He had already been attracted, during his stay at Monaco, by the curious vegetation of that rocky country, and lad taken a fancy for botany from reading a treatise on common plants, which happened to fall in his way. He therefore began to see that the profession of arms was not the only one worth living for, or in which distinction might be earned; and he took the bold resolution of applying himself to the study of medicine. This, considering the smallness of his resources, was hardly less hazardous than his former determination to join the army. Unable to defray the expense attending the studies to which he now applied himself, he was forced to seek employment as a banker’s clerk, and thus to work for the means of pursuing his purpose. He studied medicine four years, and at the end of that time, not finding it accord with his taste, he relinquished it, in order to attach himself the more closely to botany. In this science he laboured most perseveringly, and after a preparation of ten years he suddenly revealed himself and his views to the learned world in a work as remarkable for the novelty of the plan, as for the mode of execution. “For a long time,” says Cuvier, “while collecting plants, and visiting the Jardin du Roi, Lamarck gave way to discussions with other botanists on the imperfections of all the systems of classification then known, and on the ease with which a new system might be created, capable of determining plants with greater quickness and certainty. Wishing to prove what he had so often affirmed he set to work, and after six months of incessant labour he produced his “Flore Française.” This work was merely an epitome of plants indigenous to France, to which Lamarck had not ventured to add one new