THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE. IIT 



solution of many biological problems. Buffon, con- 

 sequently, was the most stimulating and suggestive 

 naturalist of the eighteenth century. There comes 

 between him and Lamarck, both in order of time 

 and sequence of ideas, Erasmus Darwin, the distin- 

 guished grandfather of Charles Darwin, 



Born at Eton, near Newark, in 1731, he walked 

 the hospitals at London and Edinburgh, and settled, 

 for some years, at Lichfield, ultimately removing to 

 Derby. Since Lucretius, no scientific writer had 

 put his cosmogonic speculations into verse until Dr. 

 Darwin made the heroic metre, in which stereotyped 

 form the poetry of his time was cast, the vehicle of 

 rhetorical descriptions of the amours of flowers and 

 the evolution of the thumb. The Loves of the Plants, 

 ridiculed in the Loves of the Triangles in the Anti- 

 Jacobin, is not to be named in the same breath, for 

 stateliness of diction, and majesty of movement, as 

 the De rerum Natura. But both the prose work 

 Zoonomia and the poem The Temple of Nature (pub- 

 lished after the author's death in 1802) have claim 

 to notice as the matured expression of conclusions at 

 which the clear-sighted, thoughtful, and withal, ec- 

 centric doctor had arrived in the closing years of his 

 life. Krause's Life and Study of the Works of Eras- 

 mtfs Darwin supplies an excellent outline of the con- 

 tents of books which are now rarely taken down 

 from the shelves, and makes clear that their author 

 had the root of the matter in him. His observations 

 and reading, for the influence of Buffon and others 



