Erasmus Darwin.
In the published address of the President of the British Association, at the meeting for 1874, we read that the late Sir Benjamin Brodie had often called his (Professor Tyndall's) attention to the fact that at the end of the last century the philosopher and poet, Erasmus Darwin, who may be especially claimed by the Midlands as their own, was the forerunner of these biologists of the present epoch who have wrought so great a change in vital dynamics. How far this is true may be worth enquiring into, as well as profitable, and we shall probably come to the same conclusion as Sir Benjamin, but at the same time be far from believing that the doctrine of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest, and the Origin of Species by such simple means, is not the offspring of the thought of our own days. The older philosopher was, indeed, the precursor of the illustrious biologists of our present times, as he was the progenitor of the greatest of them; but it will be seen that in some cases the old and modern theories are just the antitheses of each other. Still it remains a subject of interest to observe philosophers of the last and present centuries, with such relationship, pursuing the investigation of the same identical subjects, whether we attribute the circumstance to the hereditary transmission of the same tastes, a subject well dwelt upon in the writings of both, or simply to the force of precept and example.
Till the year 1781 Erasmus Darwin, M.D., F.R.S., (though he had been previously a short time stationed at Nottingham,) was in practice at Lichfield, but he afterwards resided in Derby. To judge from the "Zoonomia," and from what his literary friend, Miss Seward, tells us, his practice must have been pretty extensive. Indeed, he was an example showing that the life of even a rural disciple of Esculapius, from the natural tendency of his art and of scientific pursuits to mutual diffusion, need not, nay, should not be alienated from the latter; and such an alluring tendency of science towards medicine is happy, for the liaison is not always profitable in the vulgar sense. Dr. Johnson, the lexicographer, was in the "sere and yellow leaf' when Dr. Darwin left Lichfield. They had met, but what was the sentence of the Colossus upon the "Botanic Garden," published about three years before Johnson's death, we are not in a position to say. There was no deficiency of other society in and around the little city, such as Darwin estimated, and such as could estimate him—Watt, Boulton, Edgeworth, Day, Wedgwood, Brindley, Dr. Small, of Birmingham,) and others. No doubt it was at Lichfield, where, taking advantage of some natural capabilities presented by a parcel of land which he had purchased, he had formed a little botanical paradise, that he composed his poems. He was instrumental, too, with Sir B. Boothbey and Mr. Jackson in publishing there part of the works of Linnæus.[1]
It has been observed that Darwin was entitled to he called "the poet of art and science," but "whose taste for philosophy, perhaps, in some measure, spoiled the poet, whilst his powers of imagination were
- ↑ A Miss Jackson, of the same city, published a botanical volume, with numerous drawings of plants, which are far from contemptible. 1840: Longmans and Co.
