CHARLES DARWIN. 71 



a Principia Botanica, which reached its third edition. Erasmus 

 was a physician at Nottingham, a man of robust health and un- 

 tiring energy both of body and mind. In him we find, beyond 

 doubt, the first of the name in whom the Darwinian intellect 

 began to assert itself. He was spoken of in 1731 as "poet, 

 physician, philosopher, naturalist, and philanthropist." Such was 

 the grandfather of the Charles Darwin of our own time. He was 

 the author of the Botanic Garden^ a work containing two long 

 poems, entitled The Ecoiomy of Nature, and T/ie Loves of 

 the Plants, which, in spite of their rhapsodical extravagances and 

 quaint fancies, are, even in our day, worth reading. Not a few of 

 his " reveries in science " were converted by his grandson into 

 accepted truths. He wrote other books, but it is in his Zoo- 

 noffiia that we see the " prophetic sagacity " which was attributed 

 to him rightly enough by his grandson Charles. Prophet he cer- 

 tainly was, and as such was before his time. 



" Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered Steam, afar 

 Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car," 



said he, years before the first railway-engine astonished the natives. 

 The spread of temperance, the abolition of slavery, the humane 

 treatment of the insane, were all themes of intense interest to him. 

 Prominent among his prophetic utterances, however, are those 

 to be found in his Zoononiia, where the titles of many of 

 Charles Darwin's books and the phrases now in universal usage in 

 respect of development are expressed in words of his own. The 

 whole theory of organic development lies in embryo in this book. 

 He saw clearly the unity of parent and offspring, and one sentence 

 of his has in it the germ potential of the theory of descent. 

 "Owing to the imperfection of language," says he, "the offspring 

 is termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of 

 the parent, since n part of the embrvon-nnimnl is. or was. n pnrt of 

 the parent, and therefore may retain some of the habits of the 

 l)arent system." He constantly emphasized the hereditary nature 

 of some acquired properties, and carefully sought out any that he 

 heard of from time to time. Although he never saw what was 

 reserved for Charles Darwin to discover, the great truth of 

 * natural selection,' the agency by which variety is brought about 



