EVOLUTION : WHAT IT IS NOT, AND WHAT IT IS. 643 



ble is our reason) that animals always varied slightly, and that such 

 variations, indefinitely accumulated, would suffice to account for almost 

 any amount of ultimate difference. A donkey might thus have grown 

 into a horse, and a bird raig^t have developed from a primitive lizard. 

 Only we know it was quite otherwise ! A quiet hint from Buffon was 

 as good as a declaration from many less knowing or suggestive people. 

 All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's hint for what he meant it ; 

 and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere passing little foolish 

 vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker. 



Era'smus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool ; on 

 the contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England ; 

 be saw at once what Buffon was driving at ; and he worked out "Mr." 

 Buffon's " half -concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclu- 

 sions. The great count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English 

 contemporary. Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, 

 began in very minute marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh 

 powers and larger bodies, so as imperceptibly to transform themselves 

 into different creatures. Man, he remarked, anticipating his descend- 

 ant, takes rabbits or pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, 

 by immensely changing their shapes and colors. If man can make a 

 pouter or a fantail out of the common sort, if he can produce a piebald 

 lop-ear from the brown wild rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into 

 Black Spanish, why can not Nature, with longer time to work in, and 

 endless lives to try with, produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals 

 out of one single common ancestor ? It was a bold idea of the Lich- 

 field doctor — bold, at least, for the times he lived in — when Sam John- 

 son was held a mighty sage, and physical speculation was regarded 

 askance as having in it a dangerous touch of the devil. But the Dar- 

 wins were always a bold folk, and had the courage of their opinions 

 more than most men. So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, 

 and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin 

 ventured to point out the probability that quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, 

 and men were all mere divergent descendants of a single similar origi- 

 nal form, and even that " one and the same kind of living filament is 

 and has been the cause of organic life." 



The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at 

 all reformers. It said that Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a 

 most eccentric man. His " Temple of Nature," now, and his " Botanic 

 Garden," were vastly fine and charming poems — those sweet lines, you 

 know, about poor Eliza ! — but his zoological theories were built of 

 course upon a most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no 

 sensible person could ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius 

 — nothing more ; a mere desire to seem clever and singular. But what 

 a Nemesis the whirligig of time has brought around with it ! By a 

 strange irony of fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely 

 forgotten ; poor Eliza has survived only as our awful example of arti- 



