Between 1998 and 2000 the French scholarly collective REHSEIS held a seminar on Lamarck. Four essays developed for the seminar have now been published under the title Lamarck, philosophe de la nature. Each offers original insights and is a valuable contribution to Lamarck scholarship. Whether they collectively confirm the characterization of Lamarck as a ‘philosopher of nature’, however, is another question.

The first essay, Gabriel Gohau's ‘Lamarck, philosophe?’, concentrates on a change in Lamarck's conception of nature between 1797, when he represented ‘nature’ and ‘life’ as two separate, contrasting entities, and 1820, by which time he had come to regard life as a part of nature. Critical for this fundamental change in Lamarck's thinking, Gohau explains, was Lamarck's coming to embrace, c.1800, the idea of spontaneous generation. The idea contradicted a central claim of the chemical system Lamarck had vigorously promoted in the 1790s, namely that only living beings are capable of forming chemical compounds. Tied to this claim was the idea that all minerals were the products of the successive decomposition of compounds that had been initially generated by living things. Gohau notes that Lamarck continued to endorse this idea as late as 1809, in his Philosophie zoologique. Gohau's essay is an excellent entry into the subject of the changes and contradictions in Lamarck's theorizing over the course of his career. Gohau also provides a perceptive analysis of how Lamarck's vision of chemistry differed from Lavoisier's.

The volume's second essay, by Pietro Corsi, takes a new look at what Lamarck had in mind in 1802 when he proposed developing a science of ‘biology’. Corsi has elsewhere provided scholars with a very valuable tool for analysing Lamarck's publications – an on-line site with the texts of most of Lamarck's writings (www.lamarck.net). Corsi uses this resource to good advantage here, tracking and interpreting Lamarck's use of the words biologie, biologique and biologiste. Where most other scholars have been content to note Lamarck's early (if not entirely unprecedented) use of the word biologie, Corsi pays special attention to what Lamarck intended his science of ‘biology’ to be, and why Lamarck ultimately never developed it under that name. He offers the novel suggestion that the reason Lamarck in 1802 abandoned his plan of developing his new science of ‘biology’ was neither ill health nor lack of time (Lamarck's excuses), but instead Lamarck's perception that the new political climate was inhospitable to his materialistic explanation of vital phenomena. Corsi indicates that Lamarck's hopes for his biologie were temporarily revived in 1815 with the Restoration, but that instead of expressing himself freely he increasingly referred to God in his writings so as not to be accused of materialism or atheism.

Stéphane Tirard for his part concentrates on what Lamarck had to say about spontaneous generation. Like Gohau, Tirard underscores the tensions between the idea of spontaneous generation and Lamarck's earlier view that life was responsible for the formation of all chemical compounds. Examining Lamarck's earliest writings on the very simplest forms of animal life in 1800 and 1801, Tirard maintains that Lamarck's ‘reflection on this endpoint of animality’ came to constitute ‘the keystone of the transformist theory that Lamarck would thereafter devote himself to developing’ (p. 80). Tirard observes, however, that while Lamarck came to insist with confidence that spontaneous generation was responsible for the origin of the very simplest organisms of both the plant and the animal scales, he was more diffident about the very beginning of life on Earth. Tirard suggests that Lamarck's thinking about life's primordial origin continued to be hindered by his long-cherished belief in the organic origin of all minerals.

The final essay in the collection is an elegant analysis by Jean Gayon of the history of the phrase with which Lamarck's name is most often associated – ‘the inheritance of acquired characters’ (l'hérédité des caractères acquis). Gayon indicates that while the general concept to which this phrase corresponds can be traced back to antiquity, the phrase itself cannot. Lamarck himself never used the phrase. Indeed, as Gayon explains, heredity per se was never a major concern of Lamarck's. Lamarck set his sights on the transformation of species, not on the phenomena of heredity (notwithstanding the now-famous ‘second law’ of his Philosophie zoologique, where he states that, under the proper conditions, modifications acquired as the result of changes of habit in one generation are passed on to the next generation). Gayon goes on to trace the subsequent history of the concept and the terminology in question, exploring distinct French and British historical ‘lines’. He tentatively identifies 1850 as the date of the phrase's first appearance (in the second volume of Prosper Lucas's Traité philosophique et physiologique de l'hérédité naturelle). Gayon shows how naturalists and physicians were able to endorse the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters but still deny Lamarck's claim that such changes led to the production of new species.

For all that these essays include, there are a couple of surprising omissions. They do not deal at all with the question of why, around 1800, Lamarck concluded that species are mutable. The excuse for not looking at how Lamarck came to believe in species change might be that the question has been explored elsewhere and that here the authors wanted to focus on Lamarck as a ‘philosopher of nature’. But if that is the focus, it is ironic, given the insights that have been gleaned in this volume from careful attention to particular words and phrases, that the volume never pays explicit attention to the words Lamarck used to characterize his own intellectual role. It turns out that he never used the phrase philosophe de la nature (‘philosopher of nature’) for himself or anyone else (one can confirm this from the website cited above). He characterized himself instead – especially in the critical years immediately around 1800 – as a ‘naturalist–philosopher’. The implications of Lamarck's characterization are important. Pursuing them would have helped clarify the importance of Lamarck's practice as a naturalist (and professor) for his thoughts on the working of nature. Though that perspective is underrepresented in this volume, the volume deserves to be considered required reading for Lamarck scholars from now on.