1. J. B. Lamarck, “Discours d'ouverture, prononcé le 21 floréal an 8,” in Systême des animaux sans vertèbres (Paris, 1801), pp. 1–2. All the translations in this paper are the author's own.
2. Ideas concerning the balance of nature did appear in Lamarck's opening discours of 1798 and 1799 in his discussion of nature's checks on insect populations, but the issue of whether species might not always be conserved was not considered. This discussion was in fact taken directly from G. A.Olivier, “Mémoire sur l'utilité de l'étude des insectes, relativement à l'agriculture et aux arts,” Journal d'histoire naturelle 1 (1792), 33–56. Lamarck, “Discours préliminaire pour le cours de l'an six. lu le 14 floréal an 7 [3 May, 1799],” Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris), MS 2628 (2). This important manuscript was discovered recently among the Muséum papers by Yves Laissus, Conservateur of the Muséum library. Henceforth this will be cited as “Discours de l'an VII.”
3. Interpretations of how Lamarck came to believe in evolution have been offered by Marcel Landrieu in Lamarck: le fondateur du transformisme (Paris: 1909); Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck: les Classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790–1830), 2 vols. (Paris: 1926); Louis Roule, Lamarck et l'interprétation de la nature (Paris: 1927); Emile Guyénot, Les Sciences de la vie aux XVII e et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1941); Charles C. Gillispie, “The Formation of Lamarck's Evolutionary Theory,” Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, 9 (1956); 323–338, and “Lamarck and Darwin in the History of Science,” in Bentley Glass et al.,
4. Gillispie, “The formation of Lamarck's evolutionary theory,” p. 325.
5. J. B. Lamarck, Recherches sur les causes des principaux faits physiques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1794), II, 213–214. The comments that Lamarck made on generation in Mémoires de physiques et d'histoire naturelle (Paris: 1797), p. 270, do not constitute proof that Lamarck still believed in species fixity in 1797.