Jean Baptiste Lamarck was born on August 1, 1744, in the village of Bazentin-le-Petit in northern France. He was the youngest of eleven children born to noble parents, but he lived a life that was hardly prosperous. His father, a military officer, expected his son to become a priest. He sent Lamarck, then eleven years old, to the Jesuit school at Amiens, France, where he remained until his father's death in 1760. At age sixteen, Lamarck left school and joined the army in search of adventure. He fought in the Seven Years' War and afterward spent five years at various French ports on the Mediterranean and eastern borders of France. This traveling introduced him to the plant species of many different French regions. In 1768, an illness forced Lamarck to leave the military, and after several years, he found a job in a Paris bank. During the next four years, he studied...