born Aug. 1, 1744, Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, France
died Dec. 18, 1829, Paris
French biologist.
He is credited with the first use of the word biology (1802). He was one of the originators of the modern concept of the museum collection, an array of objects whose arrangement constitutes a classification under institutional sponsorship, maintained and kept up-to-date by knowledgeable specialists. He seems to have been the first to relate fossils to the living organisms to which they corresponded most closely. His notion that acquired traits could be inherited (called Lamarckism) was discredited after the 1930s by most geneticists except in the Soviet Union, where it dominated Russian genetics until the 1960s (see Charles Darwin ; {{link=Darwinism">Darwinism .