MARCH 63 



same artist, is called ' The Fertilisation of Egypt,' mean- 

 ing, of course, the rising of the Nile. A huge unclothed 

 man with a dog's head is praying to the star Sirius. 

 A note explains this by saying ' the Abbe 1 La Pluche 

 observes that as Sirius, or the Dog-star, rose at the time 

 of the commencement of the flood, its rising was watched 

 by the Astronomers and notice given of the approach of 

 the inundation by hanging the figure of Anubis, which 

 was that of a man with a dog's head, in all the Egyptian 

 temples.' Erasmus Darwin's mind was evidently fasci- 

 nated, as was common with all the scientific men of the 

 day, by the fertilisation of plants. In one of his notes he 

 says, ' The vegetable passion of love is agreeably seen in 

 the flower of the Parnassia (Grass of Parnassus), in which 

 the males alternately approach and recede from the female ' 

 (a practice not wholly unknown to many beside the 

 innocent Parnassia), ' and in the flower of Nigella.' We 

 call it now Love-in-the-Mist, ' in which the tall females 

 bend down to their dwarf husbands' (a picture some- 

 times seen in modern drawing-rooms). Darwin goes on 

 to say, ' I was surprised this morning to observe, amongst 

 Sir Brooke Boothby's valuable collection of plants at 

 Ashbourne, the manifest adultery of several females of 

 the plant Collinsonia, who had bent themselves into 

 contact with the males of the same plant in their vicinity, 

 neglectful of their own.' The plate and note of Gloriosa 

 superba I have mentioned elsewhere. As an outcome of 

 the extraordinary effect of Linnaeus's work on thinking 

 minds at the end of the last century, the book is of great 

 interest, though we should not call it poetry in the modern 

 sense. Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of our 

 great Darwin, who did for the middle of this century so 

 much more than even Linnaeus did for the end of the last. 

 1778. ' Miscellanea Austriaca, by Nicolai Joseph! 

 Jacquin.' This is the earliest Jacquin book that I have. 



