"According to traditions preserved in the family of Lamarck things did not happen so at all. During a reception given to the Institute at the Tuileries, Napoleon, who really liked Lamarck, spoke to him in a jocular way about his weather probabilities, and Lamarck, very much provoked (_très contrarié_) at being thus chaffed in the presence of his colleagues, resolved to stop the publication of his observations on the weather. What proves that this version is the true one is that Lamarck published another annual which he had in preparation for the year 1810. In the preface he announced that his age, ill health, and his circumstances placed him in the unfortunate necessity of ceasing to busy himself with this periodical work. He ended by inviting those who had the taste for meteorological observations, and the means of devoting their time to it, to take up with confidence an enterprise good in itself, based on a genuine foundation, and from which the public would derive advantageous results." These opuscles, such as they were, in which Lamarck treated different subjects bearing on the winds, great droughts, rainy seasons, tides, etc., became the precursors of the _Annuaires du Bureau des Longitudes_. An observation of Lamarck's on a rare and curious form of cloud has quite recently been referred to by a French meteorologist. It is probable, says M. E. Durand-Greville in _La Nature_, November 24, 1900, that Lamarck was the first to observe the so-called pocky or festoon cloud, or mammato-cirrus cloud, which at rare intervals has been observed since his time.[59] Full of over confidence in the correctness of his views formed without reference to experiments, although Lavoisier, by his discovery of oxygen in the years 1772-85, and other researches, had laid the foundations of the antiphlogistic or modern chemistry, Lamarck quixotically attempted to substitute his own speculative views for those of the discoverers of oxygen--Priestley (1774) and the great French chemist Lavoisier. Lamarck, in his _Hydrogéologie_ (1802), went so far as to declare: "It is not true, and it seems to me even absurd to believe that pure air, which has been justly called _vital air_, and which chemists now call _oxygen gas_, can be the radical of saline matters--namely, can be the principle of acidity, of causticity, or any salinity whatever. There are a thousand ways of refuting this error without the possibility of a reply.... This hypothesis, the best of all those which had been imagined when Lavoisier conceived it, cannot now be longer held, since I have discovered what is really _caloric_" (p. 161).