A genus of tropical plants of the group _Solanaceæ_ was named _Markea_ by Richard, in honor of Lamarck, but changed by Persoon and Poiret to _Lamarckea_. The name _Lamarckia_ of Moench and Koeler was proposed for a genus of grasses; it is now _Chrysurus_. Lamarck's success as a botanist led to more or less intimate relations with Buffon. But it appears that the good-will of this great naturalist and courtier for the rising botanist was not wholly disinterested. Lamarck owed the humble and poorly paid position of keeper of the herbarium to Buffon. Bourguin adds, however: "_Mais il les dut moins à ses mérites qu'aux petits passions de la science officielle._ The illustrious Buffon, who was at the same time a very great lord at court, was jealous of Linné. He could not endure having any one compare his brilliant and eloquent word-pictures of animals with the cold and methodical descriptions of the celebrated Swedish naturalist. So he attempted to combat him in another field--botany. For this reason he encouraged and pushed Lamarck into notice, who, as the popularizer of the system of classification into natural families, seemed to him to oppose the development of the arrangement of Linné." Lamarck's style was never a highly finished one, and his incipient essays seemed faulty to Buffon, who took so much pains to write all his works in elegant and pure French. So he begged the Abbé Haüy to review the literary form of Lamarck's works. Here it might be said that Lamarck's is the philosophic style; often animated, clear, and pure, it at times, however, becomes prolix and tedious, owing to occasional repetition. But after all it can easily be understood that the discipline of his botanical studies, the friendship manifested for him by Buffon, then so influential and popular, the relations Lamarck had with Jussieu, Haüy, and the zoölogists of the Jardin du Roi, were all important factors in Lamarck's success in life, a success not without terrible drawbacks, and to the full fruition of which he did not in his own life attain. CHAPTER XII LAMARCK THE ZOÖLOGIST Although there has been and still may be a difference of opinion as to the value and permanency of Lamarck's theoretical views, there has never been any lack of appreciation of his labors as a systematic zoölogist. He was undoubtedly the greatest zoölogist of his time. Lamarck is the one dominant personage who in the domain of zoölogy filled the interval between Linné and Cuvier, and in acuteness and sound judgment he at times surpassed Cuvier. His was the master mind of the period of systematic zoölogy, which began with Linné--the period which, in the history of zoölogy, preceded that of comparative anatomy and morphology.