LACÉPEDE

LACÉPEDE, BERNARD-GERMAIN-ÉTIENNE DE LA VILLE-SUR-ILLON, COMTE DE, an eminent French naturalist, was born December 26, 1756, at Agen, the chief town of the department of Lot-et-Garonne, in the S. of France. His father, the Comte de la Ville, lieutenant-general of the Sénéchaussée at Agen, gave him the name of Lacépède, in honour of a rich relative who had made him his heir. The family is admitted by Cuvier, in his Eloge Historique on Lacépède, to have been one of the most ancient and honourable in the province. At an early age the future naturalist lost his mother, but his education was conducted with the most anxious care by his father. Pains were taken that all his early impressions should be of good; and for a long time he did not know what a bad book or a bad man was. "At the age of thirteen," he writes in his Mémoires, "I still believed that all poets were like Racine or Corneille, all historians like Bossuet, all moralists like Fénelon." In his solitude at the Castle of Lacépède he read largely the best

French authors, and learned to observe and reflect. One of the first books put into his hands was Buffon's Natural History, which he read and re-read till he knew it nearly by heart. Buffon became his model, and his time was henceforth cheerfully given to the study of natural history and philosophy in all their branches. Music was the only amusement he allowed himself. He was passionately fond of it, and besides playing admirably the piano and the organ, he composed with no mean skill and success. The only two operas he ever wrote were highly praised by Gluck, though neither of them was ever brought on the stage. Lacépède's first experiments were on electricity, and one of these had very nearly proved fatal to him. The results, when communicated to Buffon, drew forth so encouraging an answer from the old man that his correspondent immediately set off to Paris to see him. In the capital he fell in with a German prince, who offered him a colonelcy in the imperial army. He closed with the offer, but never joined, or even saw, his regiment, though he wore its uniform, and called himself its colonel. He made his début in authorship in 1781 by his Essai sur l'Électricité, which he followed up, two years later, by his Physique Générale et Particulière. Both of these works were written on the same principles as Buffon's Natural History, though their subjects manifestly called for a very different mode of treatment. Their author became convinced of his mistake when it was too late, but obviated its bad consequences by buying up and destroying every copy of both works on which he could lay his hands. Charmed with the devoted attachment of his young friend, Buffon appointed him in 1785 sub-demonstrator in the Jardin du Roi; and as his own strength was now beginning to decay, proposed that he should continue the Histoire Naturelle. Lacépède accepted the proposal, and continued his researches with renewed zeal under the eye of his friend and teacher. In 1788 he published, as a continuation of Buffon, his Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, des Quadrupèdes Ovipares; and in the following year another volume On Serpents. "This work," says Cuvier, "by the interest of the facts embodied in it, and in a strictly scientific point of view, presents incontestable advantages over the immortal work of which it is the continuation." No races are visible of that antipathy to method and a precise nomenclature which marks Buffon's part of the work. Lacépède established classes, orders, genera, characterized clearly subdivisions, and enumerated and named with care the species that strictly belong to each. But with all the method of Linnaeus, he is as little philosophical as he, forming his groups entirely upon external characters, and disregarding internal structure and anatomical relations altogether. When the French Revolution broke out, Lacépède, though by birth an aristocrat, was at first favourable to it. He was twice president of the Parisian Electoral Assembly, and in 1791 became a deputy of the Legislative Assembly. He never attained any eminence, however, either as a speaker or as a politician. When the course of events seemed to bring his life into danger, he lost the little courage he had, and fled from Paris altogether, only returning thither when the death of Robespierre had put an end to the Reign of Terror. When the Jardin du Roi was re-organized as the Jardin des Plantes, he was appointed to the chair set apart for the history of fishes and reptiles. In 1796 he was chosen into the Institute of France, and two years later gave to the world his Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, of which the fifth volume appeared in 1803. This treatise was undoubtedly the greatest in that branch of science till it was driven out of the field by the much more comprehensive and philosophic work of Cuvier and Valenciennes. Lacépède's work was founded on the lists of fishes drawn up by Gosselin and Bonaterre, and included the specimens added to the royal collection before the war, as well as those in

the cabinet of the Stadtholder, brought to Paris after the conquest of Holland. Further than this it can scarcely be said to have enlarged the limits of the science at all. His work is consequently very incomplete, but it should be remembered that the comparative anatomy of fishes was in his day very little studied, and, from the political state of the country, the difficulty of procuring new specimens greater than it had ever been before or has been since. In society Lacépède was easy, polite, and anxious to agree with every body. He carried the same spirit into his scientific researches, listened believingly to the lies of travellers, and took for gospel everything that had been written by previous inquirers. Hence the complete absence of searching criticism, and the gross mistakes which, with a little care, he might easily have avoided. In 1814 appeared his Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, des Cétacés, the last and best of his separate works, though open to the same objections as have been already raised against his Natural History of Fishes. From this time, till his death, his public duties took up so much of his time that, except an occasional article in the Annales du Muséum, he made no further contribution to science. In 1799 he became a senator; in 1801 he was made president of the senate, and two years later grand chancellor of the Legion of Honour. In 1804 he was created a minister of state, and at the Restoration a peer of France. During the Hundred Days he again took office under Napoleon, as grand master of the university. He died at Epinay, October 6, 1825, in the seventieth year of his age.

With many of the qualities of a good naturalist, Lacépède wanted many that were indispensable. Many of his scientific errors are directly traceable to defects in his personal character. He was pre-eminently wanting in independence of character. Like the vicar of Bray, he cared little who sat on the throne of his country, if he retained his offices. "It is now six-and-twenty years," he wrote, "since the Revolution broke out, and during all that stormy period, thanks to Providence, I have never once failed of the obedience due to the laws and the established government." Every government in succession accepted and trusted him, because he accepted it. Indeed, he never contented himself with recognising each in its turn, but went out of his way to welcome it with the most servile adulations. In allusion to his fawning habits, and to the nature of his studies, he was nicknamed by his contemporaries "the Prince of Reptiles." But though he cringed abundantly to the men in power, he was kind and gentle to those of station lower than his own. He did a great deal of good in a very unostentatious manner, and spent the whole of his private fortune in charities. More than once he was only saved from serious embarrassments by the generosity of Napoleon. So popular had his liberality made him, that his death was mourned as a public calamity.