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French naturalist, born on the 1st of August 1744, at Bazantin, a village of Picardy.
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His entire life
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The young Lamarck entered the Jesuit seminary at Amiens around 1756.
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But not long after his father's death, Lamarck rode off to join the French army campaigning in Germany in the summer of 1761
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- After peace was declared in 1763, Lamarck spent five years on garrison duty in the south of France, until an accidental injury forced him to leave the army.
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- In 1778 his book on the plants of France, Flore Française, was published to great acclaim, in part thanks to the support of Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon)
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- With Buffon’s support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779.
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- Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (“Methodical Encyclopaedia”), a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century.
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- Shortly after Buffon’s death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of “botanist of the King and keeper of the King’s herbaria.”
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- In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades.
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n 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal d’histoire naturelle.
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- Lamarck’s career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (“National Museum of Natural History”).
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By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
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- He also began thinking about Earth’s geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802)
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- Lamarck published a series of books on invertebrate zoology and paleontology. Of these, Philosophie zoologique, published in 1809, most clearly states Lamarck's theories of evolution.
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- Most of Lamarck's life was a constant struggle against poverty; to make matters worse, he began to lose his sight around 1818, and spent his last years completely blind.
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- The first volume of Histoire naturelle des Animaux sans vertèbres was published in 1815, the second in 1822.
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- When he died, on December 28, 1829, he received a poor man's funeral (although his colleague Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire gave one of the orations) and was buried in a rented grave; after five years his body was removed, and no one now knows where his remains are.