almost incompatible with the cool investigations of science." For the last, however, he himself apologises, by observing that theorising, when our knowledge is imperfect, is not without use; neither is the theoretic distribution of natural objects, as it develops some of their analogies. His poetry few read now, though it is often distinguished by great taste and elegance of description; in fact, it is the very embarras de richesses which is its fault. Though scientific thoughts or pleasing natural objects, sparsely introduced, became giants in poetry in the hands of a Tennyson or a Browning, yet too prodigally used they ave worse than ineffective.
Darwin's poems are annotated by copious remarks which display learning, research, and many of them original views to which we have already alluded. His prophecies of future scientific triumphs have often been noticed as marvellous, and they certainly are remarkable, as, for instance, of steamships and railways; but then he ventured upon other predictions—as of subaqueous and controllable aerial locomotion, end many other things which at present are not likely to come to pass. His medical and physiological work, "Zoonomia," 1793-6, contains much that was new at the date of its publication, much that has been developed in our age—for instance, in medicine the recommendation of ovariotomy, and more explicitly of lithotrity; but, at the same time, it displays much of the fanciful and some little of the absurd, though on the whole entitled to a more frequent study. His later poem, entitled "The Temple of Nature, or Origin of Society," unnoticed in same of the biographies, was, we think, published only a few mouths before his death, in 1802, and has, like the "Botanic Garden," copious philosophical notes.
Taking his works generally, the "Botanic Garden," the "Temple of Nature," "Phytologia," and the "Zoonomia," for we do not think it necessary to specify the particular work, volume, or page, we shall find that, though Erasmus Darwin considers the earth to be still in its juvenile stage (!) he insists upon a vast antiquity, millions of years, for it; and observes, in accordance with our present geological ideas, that those parts of it which contain the highest mountains are often the newest raised, because they have nob existed long enough to be worn down by external agents; he also teaches that there has been a constant development and differentiation going on in the world, even in the sidereal system; as of stars out of nebulæ, quoting the authority of Sir W. Herschel on this subject. He studied the formation of coral-rocks, and of limestone and chalk, by organic agencies. He observes that inland seas, such as the Mediterranean, would soon become freshwater lakes by a slight change of level, as the rivers flowing through them would wash out the salt. He is a friend to the doctrine of heterogenesis, and argues far it at length in the notes to the "Temple of Nature," us well as elsewhere—
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth.
Rise the first specks of animated earth.
He further argues for a formation by apposition, and against the emboitement of germs, and supposes all organic beings to have originated in simple plasm, and, where continued through generation, by filaments and molecules or organic particles, derived from every region of the parent (pangenesis.)
