Although not in the front rank of botanists, compared with Linné, Jussieu, De Candolle, and others, yet during the twenty-six years of his botanical career it may safely be said that Lamarck gave an immense impetus to botany in France, and fully earned the title of “the French Linné.”
Lamarck not only described a number of genera and species of plants, but he attempted a general classification, as Cleland states:
“In 1785 (Hist. de l’Acad.) he evinced his appreciation of the necessity of natural orders in botany by an attempt at the classification of plants, interesting though crude, and falling immeasurably short of the system which grew in the hands of his intimate friend Jussieu.”—Encycl. Brit., Art. Lamarck.
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.