The Science of Weather and the Nature of Science

An Exclusive Excerpt from “The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck” (2026)

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We are very happy today to be able to publish this exclusive excerpt from Jessica Riskin’s new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Riverhead Books, March 2026). Jessica teaches history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Many of us are in agreement that her previous book, The Restless Clock (Chicago, 2016) is among the best treatments of the natural-philosophical problem of life in early modern Europe ever written, and deserves to be considered a new classic. It is fitting that she should turn her attention next to Lamarck (1744-1829) — amply memorialized in statues and lecture halls in France and widely characterized here as the “founder of the theory of evolution”, even as his role in the history of science is mostly downplayed or dismissed in the Anglosphere. This dismissiveness is especially regrettable, given that some of Lamarck’s ideas have been positively reassessed in recent years by scientists working in such fields as epigenetics and developmental plasticity theory. It is to be hoped that Jessica’s book will help to bring about a deeper and more complete picture of this crucial figure. Jill Lepore has said of The Power of Life that it is a “truly remarkable achievement, at once a delightfully wry and wildly entertaining biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and a riveting intellectual history.” Order your copy today. —The Editors

From THE POWER OF LIFE by Jessica Riskin. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Jessica Riskin.

*

From the garret window of the room where Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived when he first moved to Paris in his mid-twenties, around 1770, he could see nothing but clouds and sky. The clouds therefore became his companions and source of entertainment. Watching them, he began to notice how they formed, gathered and dispersed. They didn’t behave randomly, he observed, but exhibited types and patterns. He began to watch more carefully, and in this way, he became the first person to classify the clouds, producing a veritable cloud atlas for his first presentation to the Academy of Sciences in 1777. He divided clouds into five types: (1) veiled (en voile), (2) gathered (attroupés), (3) dappled (pommelés), (4) sweeping (en balayures), and (5) grouped (groupé). But Lamarck became busy, first with the study of botany and then with his new position at the National Museum of Natural History, created during the French Revolution, the wonderfully named Chair in Insects and Worms. He waited twenty-five years before actually publishing his classification of clouds, finally including it in his meteorological yearbook for Year Ten of the Revolution (1802) – the same year in which he coined the word “Biologie.”

The following year, a young English chemist named Luke Howard introduced the basic categories of the current taxonomy: “cirrus” (made of parallel fibers, from the Latin word for a tendril of hair), “cumulus” (conical heaps, from the Latin word for a heap or pile), and “stratus” (horizontal sheets, from the Latin word for a “spread”). Lamarck and Howard apparently never heard of one another, which is a shame since they might have had a lot to talk about. On the other hand, they would probably have disagreed about some things too. For instance, Howard said he used Latin terms to name the types of clouds because he intended his system to be adopted by the “learned of different nations.” This strategy was successful: Howard’s terminology established itself internationally and is still in use today.

Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms, not because he wanted to speak only to French people – after all, he drew people from all over the world to his legendary classes on invertebrate zoology – but because he hoped to create a participatory community of meteorologists that would include the non- “learned.” Only an educated minority would have understood Latin terms; and Latin names would have indicated that meteorology was an elite, scholarly pursuit, which was exactly the opposite of what Lamarck intended. To be sure, when he named plants and invertebrates, he often used Latin roots, but in those cases, he was working within traditions that had existed for centuries before him. The clouds, in contrast, had no traditional nomenclature; no one had ever named them. Embarking on an entirely new science, Lamarck was free to define its terms as he liked. And, just as he boasted that he could turn any passerby in the Garden of Plants into a botanist, he also meant to turn everyone in France, and beyond, into a meteorologist. He addressed his readers fondly and familiarly as “friends of nature.”

In September 1799, two months before Napoleon declared himself First Consul of France in a coup d’état, Lamarck published the first in his decade-long series of meteorological yearbooks, offering forecasts for the year 1800, the first year of the nineteenth century. In this inaugural yearbook, he issued a special “invitation to amateurs of meteorology” encouraging readers to annotate their copies of the book by recording their own observations in them, and to send him their annotated yearbooks at the end of the year. He offered careful instructions for how to make these annotations.

In order to understand how you’d have annotated your yearbook if you’d been one of Lamarck’s participatory readers at the turn of the nineteenth century, you first have to know that each book includes a calendar arranged in columns. From left to right, there’s a column for the day; then the month; then for “natural periods useful to observe” such as the migratory arrivals and departures of certain birds, the blooming of particular plants, and the fall of leaves from various species of tree. Next comes the most important column, which is somewhat mysteriously labeled “epochs of changes of constitution.” This column in fact contains the positions of the moon: its apogees, perigees, and the northern and southern extremes of its orbit. In the course of a lunar month, the moon’s orbit carries it not only around the earth, but also north and south, above and below the equator. Lamarck explained that when the moon was traveling through the six northern signs of the zodiac, he called this period the moon’s “boreal constitution”; and when it was traveling through the six southern signs, he called it the moon’s “austral constitution.”

The column containing the moon’s constitutions is the crucial one because Lamarck’s central meteorological principle was that the moon imposes cyclical effects upon the weather by exerting a gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere: pulling to the north, causing south winds to prevail, or to the south, bringing north winds. (Lamarck’s essential idea remains present in current meteorological science; today, meteorologists refer to the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere as “atmospheric tides.”)¹

After the column of lunar constitutions comes one for the “meteorological season,” and here Lamarck divides each of the four regular seasons into two parts: the winter and summer into “solstitial” and “median” phases, and the spring and fall into “equinoctial” and “median” phases. Next comes a column for the time of the moon’s passage over the meridian line through Paris, where Lamarck was conducting his observations; and finally, one for its declination (its angular distance above or below the equator) at noon. A second calendar, arranged in paragraphs rather than columns, describes what the weather will probably be like for each successive “constitution” of the moon. According to Lamarck’s theory, boreal constitutions, pulling to the north, bring south winds and therefore warmer temperatures, lower pressures, humidity, rain, storms and tempests; in contrast, austral constitutions, pulling to the south, bring north winds and therefore colder temperatures, higher pressures, and clear, dry weather.

In his invitation to his readers, Lamarck explains how to record their observations of the weather day by day in the column containing lunar constitutions. He also offers detailed instructions for “how to judge the state of the atmosphere.” First, he says, you have to examine whether the weather is “simple” or “mixed.” Simple weather is either calm or has wind blowing only in one direction; mixed weather has upper and lower winds blowing in different directions. The lower winds are the familiar ones that turn weathervanes and windmills and fill the sails of ships; the upper winds are those we can see through gaps in the lower clouds as they blow around the upper clouds. Sometimes, even when the sky is heavily overcast and you can’t see its upper regions, you can still discern that the weather is mixed. For instance, if a south wind is blowing the clouds northward, and yet the barometer is steady or rising, there must be a cold north wind up above bringing the higher pressures; and if it’s rainy even though a north wind is driving the lower clouds southward, you can be sure there’s a warm south wind up above.

Having explained how to observe the atmosphere and how to annotate the yearbooks, Lamarck encouraged his readers to send him their marked up books at year’s end and said he’d be especially grateful to hear from any whose observations differed significantly from the probabilities he described. He also included a thorough explanation of the new metric system of weights and measures that the National Convention had introduced in April 1795, even though the system had no immediate use for annotating the yearbooks. The metric system was provoking widespread exasperation and resentment, but Lamarck believed in it; here was a further expression of his purpose to spread scientific literacy and a participatory feeling among his readers.

* * *

True to Lamarck’s romantic nature, he really loved storms. The participatory feeling wasn’t all about measurement systems, charts and tables: he wanted his readers to pay attention to the weather not only by recording it but also by relishing it. Storms, he said, were “the most imposing and the most beautiful” of meteorological phenomena. One summer while he was up at Beauregard, his country house in Héricourt, he observed a hurricane, which he described rapturously in the following yearbook in a special section entitled “Observations on the Hurricane of July 31, 1808, and on a large rotating cloud.” The storm’s great diversity of cloud shapes and colors had fascinated him, their rapid dance across the sky so “magnificent” that “I couldn’t tire of admiring the beautiful spectacle before my eyes.”

Science and the appreciation of beauty were inseparable, since it was while he stood rapt in the midst of the storm, watching the drama unfold, that Lamarck made a surprising observation: “suddenly I perceived in a large cloud placed to the southwest, a singular movement that I had never noticed.” The cloud in question took up much of the horizon and was oddly shaped, resembling “an enormous pyramid” with its summit pointing downward toward the earth. “Soon the sides of this pyramid were torn into shreds” while its base took on “a gyratory movement,” turning on its axis “with great slowness.” This stately, circular motion was portentous: “a most violent wind” and squall soon followed, so powerful that Lamarck was obliged to flee back to the shelter of Beauregard and “abandon my observations.”

He had witnessed a similar phenomenon in Paris just a couple years earlier, in 1806, which he had also reported in the following yearbook. “On the 16th of May at about one hour thirty-five minutes in the afternoon, the sky being loaded with various clouds on the point of becoming stormy, the barometer being at 28 inches three quarters and the thermometer … at 17 degrees, I heard a rather loud clap of thunder, which had been preceded by a flash of lightning.” Turning to look toward the southwest, where he reckoned the storm would be coming from, he saw “a large blackish cloud,” and beneath it, “a whitish and hanging portion of the same cloud having the shape of an inverted cone or imitating that of a funnel.” It seemed a bit like a waterspout, except that the funnel-shaped part was quite small compared to the rest of the giant cloud above it. As he watched, he became most interested “to see the misty parts of the waterspout in a continual movement. Those of the funnel or the inverted cone turned very distinctly as if around an axis but rising and forming a spiral.” As with the other sorts of cloud-forms, so too for funnel clouds, Lamarck seems to have been the first to assign them a name.

Lamarck also loved the “spectacle of the sky” in all its myriad moods – majestic, sublime, terrible, magnificent – at sunrises and sunsets with “the clouds adorned successively in the most beautiful tints, like the tender pink, the fiery red, the most brilliant purple, finally the beautiful violet,” or else at other times when the clouds were “grouped into mountains, their faces shining, illuminated with the brilliance of silver or purest gold.” The “meteorologist’s sky,” he explained, was the portion of the atmosphere that generated the weather, an “immense laboratory” overhead.

The emotional, the lyrical and the scientific were all one sky, one weather system, one world. And the observer – Lamarck himself and each of his readers – was right there in the thick of it, not outside looking in. He emphasized the direct action that the atmosphere exerted – and the moon through its action upon the atmosphere – upon all living beings: “the intimate relations that each particular state of the sky exercises on us, as well as on all the bodies on the surface of the globe.” Anyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse has learned viscerally and dramatically just what Lamarck meant. During totality, as the moon moves across the face of the sun, the awesome thing is that you feel the astronomical event viscerally, directly in your body: the chill, the darkness, the spreading hush. Even if we only notice it at certain moments, especially during extreme experiences like eclipses or storms, we’re always being acted upon by the atmosphere, which is always being acted upon by the sun and the moon. Rather than lifting the observer out of the world into a position of external, objective witness, Lamarck’s science resided in the thick of the storm: it was all about the intimacy of witness with world.

* * *

Lamarck’s yearbooks generated lots of interest and commentary. In the dailies, they were announced, attacked, defended, and their probabilities compared to the actual weather as it came to pass, by Lamarck himself and by others.² With all the attention they attracted, they often sold well enough to require a second printing.

One particularly dashing defender of Lamarck’s was the Parisian balloonist and parachutist André-Jacques Garnerin. Captured by the British during the Revolutionary wars, then handed over to the Austrians, Garnerin had spent three years as a prisoner of war in Buda (the now-Hungarian city directly across the Danube from Pest) passing the time by dreaming up designs for parachutes with the idea of escape. After his release, on the clear autumn evening of October 22^nd, 1797, in a park in Paris (the Jardin de Mousseau, which is now the Parc Monceau), Garnerin made the world’s first descent by parachute. He first rose to a height of 900 meters and then audaciously cut the cords attaching his basket to his balloon. The crowd craned its collective neck and held its collective breath as Garnerin initially plummeted like a rock, then when his parachute opened, he began to pitch about violently in the wind, finally dropping out of view. Aghast, the spectators rushed together in the direction of Garnerin’s fall, then cheered riotously when they saw him come galloping back into the garden on horseback, perfectly intact except for a mildly sprained ankle.[iii]³

A young woman in the crowd named Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse was especially inspired by the performance. She made her way to Garnerin to introduce herself, and soon became his pupil, then his wife, and the first woman parachutist. Before starting her lessons, Garnerin had to persuade the authorities that women should be allowed to go up in balloons alongside men. This had been disallowed for a couple reasons: first, the members of the Academy of Sciences warned that women’s fragile organs might not tolerate air travel; and then the government authorities had judged it unseemly for men and women to occupy the same balloon basket.

Garnerin’s arguments prevailed, however, and he soon received the following remarkably considerate response from the city government: “Citizen, according to the complaint that you have addressed against the order of the central office, which forbids you from traveling in an aerostat with a young citoyenne, we have consulted the Minister of the Interior and that of the general police… . [We all] think that there is no more scandal in seeing two persons of different sexes rise together into the air, than in seeing them get into the same carriage, and that moreover one cannot prevent an adult woman from doing in this respect what one allows men to do, and from giving, by rising into the air, a proof both of her confidence in the practice and of her intrepidity.”⁴

In the autumn of 1805, on the occasion of Garnerin’s thirty-ninth aerostatic ascent and fifth descent by parachute, he cited Lamarck’s yearbooks as the most useful thing to him in his aerial adventures. Since his balloons were ungovernable, leaving him entirely at the mercy of the weather, he said the best he could do was to know as much as possible about the forecast. “Never oars nor rudder, wings nor sails, bird’s flight nor carp’s leap, will direct a balloon,” waxed Garnerin poetically. “Mr. Lamarck’s meteorological directory is worth more … than all the calculations of modern Icaruses.”

But Lamarck’s colleagues were less enthusiastic. Once again, when he tried to read his meteorological theory to the members of the First Class of the National Institute in 1802, as had happened five years earlier with his work on the composition of matter, he encountered vehement opposition, particularly from Laplace.⁵ To Lamarck’s chagrin, his adversaries cast his meteorological work as outdated, superstitious nonsense: they constantly referred to the yearbooks as “almanacs,” and to the probabilistic reasoning they contained as “predictions,” insinuating that Lamarck’s meteorology was essentially astrology. As with Lamarck’s other struggles with his critics, this dispute with Laplace was fundamental, having to do with the nature of science, and even of the world itself. What counts as a scientific explanation? Is it legitimate science if you acknowledge, as Lamarck did, that the causes are not absolutely determinative of certain outcomes? Is the world deterministic?

Lamarck didn’t see the world as deterministic, or science as the description of deterministic mechanisms. In the case of the moon’s influence on the weather, he emphasized that many different factors affected it, rendering its effects uncertain. Lamarck identified two sorts of complicating factors: those that acted in a regular and predictable manner, and those that acted irregularly. The regular complications included the fact that the moon’s elliptical orbit carries it away from and back toward the earth during each lunar month. From its farthest point, its apogee, its gravitational pull is weakest, while from its closest point, its perigee, the influence is strongest. There are also the lunar “syzygies” – its “oppositions” with the sun, when it is on the opposite side of the earth, and its “conjunctions” with the sun, when it is on the same side.

Solstices and equinoxes – and in general, the positions of the earth relative to the sun – were also regularly occurring situations that affected the influence of the moon on the atmosphere. Finally, in terms of complicating factors that act irregularly, Lamarck mentioned clouds and storms – in other words, the weather has a feedback effect upon itself. Added to all this complexity was the fact that the earth itself was in a state of continual transformation: according to Lamarck, nothing in nature remained the same even “for two seconds in a row.” The oceans were always modifying the surface of the globe; the moon was continually moving the sea basin and the earth’s center of gravity; and the planet was always absorbing solar light, which transformed its matter, mass and volume. All in all, the earth’s landscape, atmosphere and climate were a great commotion of interacting elements.

Others who had sought connections between the moon and the weather had tended to simplify the situation by focusing on certain points in the moon’s orbit such as full moons, new moons, apogees, perigees, oppositions and conjunctions. For instance, in 1770 – while Lamarck had been garrisoned with his regiment in Provence admiring the wildflowers – an Italian priest and professor of geography and astronomy at the University of Padua named Giuseppe Toaldo had published a “Meteorological essay on the true influence of the stars upon the seasons and changes of weather.” Toaldo wrote that the moon acted upon the earth and its inhabitants by means of its light, heat, and gravitational attraction and that its influence became important at certain points such as perigees and syzygies. Lamarck drew upon and appreciatively cited Toaldo’s observations in developing his own theory but, he said, it was a mistake to focus upon certain points of the moon’s orbit: the moon acts upon the earth’s atmosphere all the time, in a continuous way, and always all mixed up with many other influences, not “in indivisible and determinable instants.”

This complex mixture of factors made the moon’s role hard to identify, and Lamarck confessed he had almost given up hope. “For more than twenty years,” he recalled, “I alternately resumed and abandoned this interesting research. I often spoke about it to my friends….” But try as he might, he couldn’t find patterns to confirm his conviction of the moon’s influence on the weather until he finally realized that this influence wasn’t absolute, but rather subject to many complicating factors, and yet it remained perceptible. Overall, he estimated that the weather corresponded with the probabilities derived from his theory about five-eighths of the time. This was far from perfectly predictive, but he thought it was enough to be useful. The probabilities he offered were grounded in theory and observation, he insisted, and therefore, whatever Laplace might say, “[i]t is not an opinion that I am presenting here, it is a fact that I am announcing; it is an order of things.”

To Laplace – whose work in mathematics included pivotal contributions to the field of probability theory – Lamarck’s “probabilities” were no better than astrological prognostications. Lamarck offered descriptive forecasts such as “we have reason to expect strong winds, maybe violent or tempestuous…. [I]t would be imprudent to set out to sea or to engage in any enterprise that requires calm weather.” These were not probabilities in Laplace’s estimation: his probabilities were mathematical expressions, not conversational descriptions. This divergence was connected to a deeper difference between the two. Laplace’s world, even including the most minor and insignificant events, was as deterministic “as the revolutions of the sun.” Humans’ sense of having a free will and of making unconstrained choices were just “illusions of the mind.”⁶ In Lamarck’s view, in contrast, the world was made up of many small agencies acting in concert, its future open to whatever they might bring about.

To express his idea of an utterly deterministic world, Laplace imagined an infinite intelligence that could comprehend all the interacting forces in the universe. For such a being, he said, nothing would be uncertain “and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” The human mind could gain but a “feeble idea” of such an intelligence. The best sort of approach we could make, Laplace thought, was through astronomy and mathematics, which would lead the mind “back continually to the vast intelligence … from which it will always remain infinitely removed.” I don’t suppose Laplace’s hypothetical omniscient being might be reminding you of anyone?

Isaac Newton, whose science provided Laplace with his starting point, came right out and said it in 1713 in the second edition of his Principia, the magnum opus in which he laid out his physical system of the universe: “it follows, that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being; and … that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.” The “French Newton,” as the popular press reverently nicknamed Laplace, showed Newtonian tendencies not only in his system of celestial mechanics but also in some of the theological ideas he attached to it.

God controlled everything in Newton’s universe: the world operated according to God’s “original perfect idea by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” All the parts of the world were God’s “Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will,” and there were “no powers of nature at all that can do anything of themselves.” In fact, according to Newton, the world-machinery functioned only through God’s immediate presence all throughout and would otherwise grind to a halt.⁷ In Laplace’s cosmology, likewise, nothing enjoyed its own power to act: the deterministic mechanism of the divinely created universe left no room for other agencies.

This might seem like a surprising thing to say about Laplace, who has been often invoked as an early champion of atheism. But in fact, Laplace wasn’t an atheist. While he left behind the Catholic orthodoxy in which he grew up, and especially rejected the possibility of miracles, he consistently expressed belief in a supreme power behind natural processes: he referred to a divine intelligence in his published writings and to God in private letters. According to an often-told story, Napoleon asked Laplace why he made no mention of God in his work on celestial mechanics and Laplace replied that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” The anecdote, a favorite of popular science writers, seems to have originated with Napoleon’s doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi. In Antommarchi’s version, Bonaparte was displeased by the response; but then Antommarchi’s purpose was hagiographic propaganda, and he offered the story as evidence that the emperor was respectably devout.⁸

According to the astronomer William Herschel, who witnessed Laplace’s and Napoleon’s exchange, Laplace had simply wanted to show that “a chain of natural causes” could account for the “wonderful system” of the heavens. The question of God’s existence didn’t come into it. This is perfectly consistent with what Laplace himself wrote: that the supreme intelligence might well have worked entirely through material causes, with no need for direct supernatural intervention of the sort Newton insisted upon. If indeed Laplace said he had no need of a particular theological hypothesis, it was likely Newton’s idea of constant, direct divine intervention in nature that he rejected, and not the idea of God’s presence behind the world-machine. In fact, Laplace boasted that his own findings regarding the stability of the solar system would have confirmed Newton’s conviction that the universe could only be the work of an intelligent and all-powerful being.⁹

In short, the deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was the manifestation of omnipotence: a total consolidation of power, with no room for even minor assertions of choice or will, and no such thing as contingency or uncertainty: these were but figments of human ignorance, illusion and folly. How different a world – how even opposite a world – from Lamarck’s churning commotion of beings and forces in continual self-transformation.

* * *

Soon after publishing his first yearbook, at the end of the year 1800, Lamarck went to see the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whom Napoleon had just appointed Minister of the Interior. Lamarck wanted to persuade Chaptal to create a government service that would receive meteorological observations and information from all over France: the world’s first national weather bureau. Chaptal was enthusiastic; the very next day, he sent off letters to departmental prefects in every region of the country asking them each to name someone to the new position of government meteorological correspondent. Chaptal charged Lamarck with the welcome task of directing this first government weather agency, which entailed sending out exact instructions to the correspondents regarding how to conduct and record their observations, receiving their responses, and overseeing the process of organizing all the information into general tables. This job brought Lamarck to the Interior Ministry several times a week, as weather information began pouring in from all quarters.¹⁰

Alas, the agency was short-lived. In August 1804, three months after Napoleon had had himself crowned Emperor, Chaptal resigned as interior minister. In his letter of resignation, he said he wanted to spend more time with his chemistry. He told a more complicated story in his journal, having to do with the ins and outs of foreign and domestic diplomacy in the wake of Napoleon’s self-promotion to emperor. Meanwhile, a rumor circulated that Napoleon had provoked a falling-out with Chaptal over Chaptal’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, a stage actress at the Comédie Française. According to the rumor, Napoleon had deliberately summoned Bourgoin to his residence one evening while he was working there with Chaptal. When she was announced, Napoleon ordered the servant to have her wait for him, whereupon Chaptal brusquely gathered up his papers and stormed out. This “coup de théâtre,” if it took place, must surely have been designed to provoke Chaptal’s resignation, which at any rate came at a moment when Napoleon was eliminating all the more independent-minded administrators and surrounding himself with absolutely loyal followers.

With Chaptal’s departure, the meteorological correspondence service was abolished. All the records were confiscated and sent to the Bureau of Longitudes (a government agency founded in 1795 by the Revolutionary National Convention to improve astronomy and navigation), which was just coming under the directorship of – you guessed it – Laplace. That was the end of official French meteorology for a time. Only after the passage of several decades and political regimes did a Parisian doctor, botanist, and geologist named Charles Martins, together with two colleagues, re-start the practice of a meteorological correspondence and annual yearbook. That same year, 1848, saw a new revolution: the Second Republic was establishing itself just as Martins and his colleagues were launching their meteorological project. But history repeated itself: by the time they published their third volume, in 1851, the Second Republic was already giving way to the Second Empire under Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III (Napoléon le petit as Victor Hugo devastatingly nicknamed him, or to Karl Marx, the farcical and grotesquely mediocre echo of his formidable uncle.)¹¹

Martins was an admirer of Lamarck: he also published a new edition of Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy to which he added a long biographical introduction, proclaiming grandiosely, “the hour of justice has sounded, and the posthumous glory of Lamarck casts an unexpected glow on France.” In the first of their yearbooks, for 1849, Martins and his colleagues echoed Lamarck by modestly referring to themselves as “three friends of Meteorology” and promised to compile the information gathered by “zealous and disinterested” observers from all over France. In 1852, they co-founded the Meteorological Society of France, which gave rise to the governmental Central Meteorological Bureau in 1878, which developed through various stages into today’s Météo-France.[xii]¹²

But that was all decades after Lamarck’s death. In his own time, after the self-emperor-ification of Napoleon, the resignation of Chaptal, and the cancellation of the meteorological correspondence, the opposition to Lamarck’s own yearbooks grew ever more concerted. The nastiness of the campaign against him so painful that decades later, following his death, Auguste would express deep bitterness on his father’s behalf. No science could be more useful and important, Auguste reflected, and yet although people had done plenty of observing and recording, no one had embarked on an actual science of meteorology; “my father was the first to try it.” Instead of praising and supporting his pioneering effort, those with power and influence had subjected him to ridicule and “persecution plotted in the shadows.”

Lamarck ignored it for as long as he could, and carried on compiling and publishing annually, but at last, in 1809, as the tenth yearbook appeared, Napoleon himself instructed Lamarck “to immediately cease all publication of his observations on the atmosphere,” as Lamarck later recalled. “What a strange thing,” he lamented, to ban his work even though he wasn’t “writing at all about politics,” and devoted himself exclusively to “studies of nature.” It does seem extraordinary that Napoleon the great modernizer, the mastermind of rational, scientific approaches to governmental administration and authority, should have taken such a hate to meteorology, of all things. But perhaps, upon reflection, it’s not so surprising after all. Meteorology resists a reductive, deterministic model of science. And the weather defies control. Perhaps that’s at least partly why Lamarck found it so fascinating.

At any rate, Lamarck was quite mistaken to suggest that “studies of nature” are separate from “politics.” Lamarck’s natural science was overtly materialist, granted creative agency to the humblest of living beings, combined poetry with observation and measurement, insisted upon the embroilment of the observer – sensory, physical, emotional – in the world observed, and promulgated a participatory model of scientific and governmental authority. To Napoleon and his scientific advisors, that was all plainly subversive.

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Main primary sources

Cuvier, “Eloge,” v (cloud-watching). [Cotte], “Mémoire” (Lamarck’s 1777 presentation to the Academy of Sciences, of which nothing remains except Cotte’s description).

Lamarck, “Sur la forme,” 149 (not random), 153 (types of clouds); “Nouvelle définition,” 113 (addition in 1805 of seven more types, brumeux [misty], terminés [terminated], en lambeaux [ragged], boursouflés [puffy], en barres [bar-shaped], coureurs [running], and de tonnerre [thunder]); Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 85-88 (atmospheric constitutions, complicating factors), 93-95 (“invitation to amateurs,” annotation instructions, annotated yearbooks request), 96-113 (metric system), 97 (“two seconds”); Annuaire pour l’an X, 24-25 (calendar columns example), 50-51 (“reason to expect”) 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an 1807, 171-72 (funnel cloud); Annuaire pour l’an 1808, 1 (“friends of nature”), 200 (“most imposing and beautiful”); Annuaire pour l’an 1809, 184-87 (hurricane), 164 (bodily influence of atmosphere); Annuaire de l’an xiii, 97-98 (“spectacle of sky,” “immense laboratory,” “intimate relations”); “Mémoire sur le mode de rédiger … les observations météorologiques”; Météorologie, 451-53, 474 (chagrin at colleagues’ reaction), 475-76 (“what a strange thing”); De l’influence de la lune, 430 (“indivisible and determinable instants”), 431 (twenty years of hesitation); Extrait d’un mémoire, 148 (“not an opinion”). Howard, Essay, 6 (“learned”). Laplace, Philosophical Essay, 3-4 (infinitely intelligent being); “On the Notion of Power” and “On Causality,” in Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 224-232 (contingency a figment). Garnerin, Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 8 October 1805, 59-60 (“modern Icaruses”). Haeghens, et al., Annuaire météorologique, ii-iii (“three friends of Meteorology”). Newton, “General Scholium,” 389-90. Martins, “Introduction,” lxxxiv (posthumous glory). Chaptal, Mes souvenirs, 106-107 and note 1 (Napoleon/Bourgoin episode). A. Lamarck – Cuvier, 8 February 1830, IF GC Ms 3252 / f. 358-359, 3-4 (Auguste’s bitter reflection).

Influence of the moon on the atmosphere, atmospheric constitutions:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an IX, 109 –111; Extrait d’un mémoire; De l’influence de la lune; “Météorologie.” Toaldo, Essai, 89-94.

Government weather agency:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an XI, 85-86, 154; Annuaire pour 1807, 203; Annuaire pour 1810, 150; Météorologie, 469-473, 476. Lalande, “Histoire de l’astronomie pour l’année 1801,” 26.

“French Newton”:

Le Moniteur universel, no. 308, 4 November 1811; Journal de l’Empire, 18 May 1812, 4; Pierre-Josoph-Spiridion Dufey, Nouveau dictionnaire historique des environs de Paris (Paris: Charles Perrotin, 1825), 11.

Secondary sources:

Packard, Lamarck, 79-82. Landrieu, Lamarck, 133-149. Bourdier, “Esquisse,” 34-35. Bange and Corsi, “Chronologie”. Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy.” Alder, The Measure of All Things (resentment of the metric system). Delange, “Phénomènes,” 134 (negative response to Lamarck’s meteorology). Schiavon and Rollet, Pour une histoire du Bureau des longitudes.

Women parachutists:

Noyes, Lady Icarus, 101; Kotar and Gessler, Ballooning, 81-82; Marck, Elles ont conquis le ciel (women’s organs).

1. See Hagan, Forbes and Richmond, “Atmospheric Tides,” 164.

2. See e.g. Journal de Paris, 18 January 1800, 534; Le Courrier des spectacles, 16 March 1800, p. 2; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 5 August 1801, 1301; Mercure de France, 22 November 1801, 398-99; La Clef du cabinet des souverains, 4 October 1802, 8; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 31 August 1804, 1504; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 4 October 1804, 39; Le Journal de Paris, 8 July 1808, 1356; Le Journal de Paris, 17 October 1808, 2157; Journal de Paris, 22 December 1808, 2584; Le Journal de Paris, 31 December 1808, 2648-49; Le Journal de Paris, 14 December 1809, 2510-11. Lalande criticized Lamarck’s meteorological theory: Mercure de France, 7 March 1807, 472. René Tourlet, a doctor and science journalist, defended Lamarck: Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 4 February 1808, 139-140. Many thanks to Pietro Corsi for help tracking the news of the yearbooks.

3. Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, No. 33, 24 October 1797, 131; Journal de Paris, No. 33, 24 October 1797, 135; Priscilla Lamure, “Le premier saut en parachute,” Écho de presse, Retronews, 3/13/2018. On Garnerin, see Perrin, La Vie rocambolesque d’André Garnerin.

4. La Chronique universel, 15 June 1798, 2. Later, in London, Garnerin tried another feat: “I launched a cat with a parachute, in miniature, which encompassed a column of air 38 inches and a half in its basis. The descent was gradual, and the cat fell, with his little vehicle, in the garden of a man who insists on receiving three guineas for indemnification of the trespass committed by poor puss, or at least his picture with the parachute,” “M. Garnerin’s Account,” in Derby Mercury, 12 August 1802, 3.

5. Burkhardt (Spirit of System, pp. 10 and 225, n.20) identifies the memoir in question as “Mémoire sur les variations de l’état du ciel,” later published in the Journal de physique, 56 (1802), 114-138. The original source is a letter from Étienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire to Georges Cuvier, Institut de France, Fonds Cuvier, Ms 3225 (12).

6. Only in the twentieth century, apparently, did writers start referring to this hypothetical being as “Laplace’s Demon.” See e.g. The Monist, Vol. 41 (1931), p. 3.

7. “Clarke’s Second Reply,” in Leibniz and Clarke, Correspondence, 12, 13 (see also 33); and Newton, Opticks, Query 31, p. 403. Newton’s friend and translator Samuel Clarke represented him in an epistolary debate with G.W. Leibniz in 1715-1716. Clarke expressed Newton’s view that God reigned over the laws of mechanics: they held true only as a result of his immediate presence and he could suspend them at any moment. Leibniz objected that it represented a poor view of God’s power to think he couldn’t create a mechanical system that would run on its own without his continual intervention. See “Leibnitz’s Second Letter” in Leibniz and Clarke, Correspondence, 9.

8. Laplace (Exposition, 479) agreed with Leibniz that the world, once created, should run on its own without divine intervention, though he dismissed Leibniz’s idea of a “preestablished harmony” coordinating the movements and changes undergone by all substances in the world in accordance with the laws of mechanics. For evidence that he wasn’t an atheist, see his Laplace’s letter to his son, Œuvres Vol. 1: v–vi. Roger Hahn (Pierre-Simon Laplace, 67, 172-173) is among those who describe Laplace as an atheist. His main evidence is a draft of a letter to Laplace from the geologist Jean-Etienne Guettard in which Guettard accuses Laplace of having denied God’s existence. It’s impossible to be certain about Laplace’s inner state of belief, but in his public and private writing, he rejected Christian doctrine and denied the existence of miracles but retained faith in a divine intelligence behind the workings of nature. Laplace’s conversation with Napoleon: Antommarchi, Derniers momens, Vol. 1: 282. The story found its way into Napoleon’s “memoirs” which, though written in the first person, were in fact compiled from various sources by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon; see Lamothe-Langon, Mémoires, Vol. 1: 262. The story’s popularity: see e.g. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 46.

9. Lubbock, Herschel Chronicle, 310; Laplace, Exposition, 479. According to another fellow astronomer, François Arago, Laplace was unhappy with Antommarchi’s implication that he was an atheist and asked Arago to persuade the publisher to delete the passage: Faye, Sur l’origine du monde, 110-111.

10. Despite his support for a government meteorological service, Chaptal declined to endorse Lamarck’s theory. See Petit-Perrin, “La Météorologie,” 97-98 and Chaptal-Lamarck, lettre du 23 Vendemiaire an XI (16 octobre 1802), AN Serie F/20/1.

11. Victor Hugo, Napoléon le petit (1852); Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

12. “Historique,” Météo et Climat; “L’Office national météorologique (1920-1945),” Méteo-France.