18 LECTURES 



great mass of information that had been accumulating to 

 his hand; and I doubt not even Aristotle, the ancient sage 

 of the peripatetic school in Greece, over 2,000 years ago, 

 had his material and fact; and we may add, his myth col- 

 lectors, whose life histories dip far back into the pre-tradi- 

 tional times of man's career upon earth, and into ages of 

 which we have no history. 



It can now be appreciated that ninety odd years ago an 

 enormous mass of material and facts were again, and had 

 been, accumulating since the Linnaean period; and, in 

 half a century thereafter, a Charles Darwin came upon 

 the scene to handle them as a whole and in due course to 

 flash to the world their significance. 



We are now in a position to glance at some of the work 

 that was being done at about the beginning of the present 

 century, and to pass in review some of the ideas enter- 

 tained by the biological writers of that time. It was 

 nearly sixty years prior to the appearance of Darwin's 

 "Origin of Species," and yet Erasmus Darwin, his dis- 

 tinguished father, in his very interesting work, "The 

 Temple of Nature, or, the Origin of Society" (a copy of 

 which I have in my library and which was published in 

 Baltimore, in IbOt), says in the first Canto, on the Pro- 

 duction of Life; 



"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves 

 Was born, and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; 

 First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, 

 Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; 

 These, as successive generations bloom, 

 New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; 

 Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, 

 And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing." 



In an explanatory footnote to these lines he is careful 

 to say: "The earth was originally covered with water, 

 as appears from some of its highest mountains consisting 

 of shells connected together by a solution of part of them, 

 as the limestone rocks of the Alps;" (so much from 

 "Ferber's Travels," to which the author of the "Temple 

 of Nature" adds: "It must be therefore concluded that 

 animal life began beneath the sea." 



It is unnecessary to point out in this place the double 

 fallacy in this theory, for, lhanks to our geologists, the 

 knowledge of the mode of the formation of mountains is 

 now well understood, and the occurrence in them of 

 marine shells easily explained. Still Erasmus Darwin's 

 notions of the origin of life are far in advance of the 



