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The cross sections for Coulomb excitation and the energies of the accessible low-lying rotational states in the six most abundant isotopes of gadolinium have been determned from measurements on the corresponding groups of inelastically scattered protons and deuterons. The projectiles were accelerated in an electrostatic generator to energies around 4 Mev. Particles scattered from isotopically pure targets prepared in an isotope separator were observed at an angle of 145 deg with respect to the beam by means of a magnetic spectrometer of high resolution. The lifetimes for the first excited states in Gd/sup 154/ and Gd/sup 156/ derived from the measured cross sections are in good agreement with the reported directly measured lifetimes of these states. (auth)