LAMALOU-LES-BAINS, a watering-place of southern France in the department of Hérault, 53½ m. W. of Montpellier by rail, in a valley of the southern Cévennes. Pop. (1906) 720. The waters, which are both hot and cold, are used in cases of rheumatism, sciatica, locomotor ataxy and nervous maladies.
LAMA-MIAO, or Dolon-nor, a city of the province of Chih-li, China, 150 m. N. of Peking, in a barren sandy plain watered by the Urtingol, a tributary of the Shang-tu-ko. The town proper, almost exclusively occupied by Chinese, is about a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, has narrow and dirty streets, and contains a population of about 26,000. Unlike the ordinary Chinese town of the same rank, it is not walled. A busy trade is carried on between the Chinese and the Mongolians, who bring in their cattle, sheep, camels, hides and wool to barter for tea, tobacco, cotton and silk. At some distance from the Chinese town lies the Mongolian quarter, with two groups of lama temples and villages occupied by about 2300 priests. Dr Williamson (Journeys in North China, 1870) described the chief temple as a huge oblong building with an interior not unlike a Gothic church. Lama-miao is the seat of a manufactory of bronze idols and other articles of ritual, which find their way to all parts of Mongolia and Tibet. The craftsmen work in their own houses.
LAMAR, LUCIUS QUINTUS CINCINNATUS (1825-1893), American statesman and judge, was born at the old “Lamar Homestead,” in Putnam county, Georgia, on the 17th of September 1825. His father, Lucius Q. C. Lamar (1797-1834), was an able lawyer, a judge of the superior court of Georgia, and the compiler of the Laws of Georgia from 1810 to 1819 (1821). In 1845 young Lamar graduated from Emory College (Oxford, Ga.), and in 1847 was admitted to the bar. In 1849 he removed to Oxford, Mississippi, and in 1850-1852 was adjunct professor of mathematics in the state university. In 1852 he removed to Covington, Ga., to practise law, and in 1853 was elected a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. In 1855 he returned to Mississippi, and two years later became a member of the National House of Representatives, where he served until December 1860, when he withdrew to become a candidate for election to the “secession” convention of Mississippi. He was elected to the convention, and drafted for it the Mississippi ordinance of secession. In the summer of 1860 he had accepted an appointment to the chair of ethics and metaphysics in the university of Mississippi, but, having been appointed a lieutenant-colonel in the Confederate Army in the spring of 1861, he resigned his professorship. The colonel of his regiment (Nineteenth Mississippi) was killed early in the battle of Williamsburg, on the 5th of May 1862, and the command then fell to Lamar, but in October he resigned from the army. In November 1862 he was appointed by President Jefferson Davis special commissioner of the Confederacy to Russia; but he did not proceed farther than Paris, and his mission was soon terminated by the refusal of the Confederate Senate to confirm his appointment. In 1866 he was again appointed to the chair of ethics and metaphysics in the university of Mississippi, and in the next year was transferred to the chair of law, but in 1870, Republicans having become trustees of the university upon the readmission of the state into the Union, he resigned. From 1873 to 1877 he was again a Democratic representative in Congress; from 1877 to 1885 he was a United States senator; from 1885 to January 1888 he was secretary of the interior; and from 1888 until his death at Macon, Ga., on the 23rd of January 1893, he was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress Lamar fought the silver and greenback craze and argued forcibly against the protective tariff; in the department of the interior he introduced various reforms; and on the Supreme Court bench his dissenting opinion in the Neagle Case (based upon a denial that certain powers belonging to Congress, but not exercised, were by implication vested in the department of justice) is famous. But he is perhaps best known for the part he took after the Civil War in helping to effect a reconciliation between the North and the South. During the early secession movement he strove to arouse the white people of the South from their indifference, declaring that secession alone could save them from a doom similar to that of the former whites of San Domingo. He probably never changed his convictions as to the righteousness of the “lost cause”; but he accepted the result of the war as a final settlement of the differences leading to it, and strove to restore the South in the Union, and to effect the reunion of the nation in feeling as well as in government. This is in part seen from such speeches as his eulogy on Charles Sumner (27th of April 1874), his leadership in reorganizing the Democratic party of his own state, and his counsels of peace in the disputed presidential election of 1876.
See Edward Mayes, Lucius Q. C. Lamar: His Life, Times and Speeches (Nashville, Tenn., 1896).
LAMARCK, JEAN BAPTISTE PIERRE ANTOINE DE MONET, Chevalier de (1744-1829), French naturalist, was born on the 1st of August 1744, at Bazantin, a village of Picardy. He was an eleventh child; and his father, lord of the manor and of old family, but of limited means, having placed three sons in the army, destined this one for the church, and sent him to the Jesuits at Amiens, where he continued till his father’s death. After this he would remain with the Jesuits no longer, and, not yet seventeen years of age, started for the seat of war at Bergen-op-Zoom, before which place one of his brothers had already been killed. Mounted on an old horse, with a boy from the village as attendant, and furnished by a lady with a letter of introduction to a colonel, he reached his destination on the evening before a battle. Next morning the colonel found that the new and very diminutive volunteer had posted himself in the front rank of a body of grenadiers, and could not be induced to quit the position. In the battle, the company which he had joined became exposed to the fire of the enemy’s artillery, and in the confusion of retreat was forgotten. All the officers and subalterns were killed, and not more than fourteen men were left, when the oldest grenadiers seeing there were no more French in sight proposed to the young volunteer so soon become commandant to withdraw his men. This he refused to do without orders. These at last arrived; and for his bravery he was made an officer on the spot, and soon after was named to a lieutenancy.
After the peace, the regiment was sent to Monaco. There one of his comrades playfully lifted him by the head, and to this it was imputed that he was seized with disease of the glands of the neck, so severe as to put a stop to his military career. He went to Paris and began the study of medicine, supporting himself by working in a banker’s office. He early became interested in meteorology and in physical and chemical speculations of a chimerical kind, but happily threw his main strength into botany, and in 1778 published his Flore française, a work in which by a dichotomous system of contrasting characters he enabled the student with facility to determine species. This work, which went through several editions and long kept the field, gained for its author immediate popularity as well as admission to the Academy of Sciences.
In 1781 and 1782, under the title of botanist to the king, an appointment obtained for him by Buffon, whose son accompanied him, he travelled through various countries of Europe, extending his knowledge of natural history; and on his return he began those elaborate contributions to botany on which his reputation in that science principally rests, namely, the Dictionnaire de Botanique and the Illustrations de Genres, voluminous works contributed to the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1785). In 1793, in consequence of changes in the organization of the natural history department at the Jardin du Roi, where he had held a botanical appointment since 1788, Lamarck was presented to a zoological chair, and called on to lecture on the Insecta and Vermes of Linnaeus, the animals for which he introduced the term Invertebrata. Thus driven, comparatively late in life, to devote his principal attention to zoology instead of botany, he had the misfortune soon after to suffer from impaired vision; and the malady resulted subsequently in total blindness. Yet his greatest zoological work, the Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, was published from 1815 to 1822, with the assistance, in the last two volumes, of his eldest daughter and of P. A. Latreille (1762-1833). A volume of plates of the fossil shells of the neighbourhood of Paris was collected in 1823 from his memoirs in the Annales des Muséums. He died on the 18th of December 1829.