In Retrospect: Lamarck's treatise at 200

摘要

On 14 August 1809, Jean Baptiste Lamarck presented the two volumes of his most important book, Philosophie Zoologique, to France's Institut National des Sciences et Arts. Twenty years later, he died penniless, blind and scorned, surrounded by hundreds of unsold copies of his book. He was buried in a rented plot, exhumed and 'dispersed' five years later. Today, someone else occupies the grave of the man who founded the field of invertebrate zoology, coined the word biology and proposed the first scientific theory of evolution. His Philosophie Zoologique hasn't fared much better. It was mocked, ignored, belittled and purposely misunderstood for many years, remaining untranslated into English for 105 years. It took just 77 years, by contrast, to translate Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species into Ukrainian.