102 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



not by direct assault ; and to those who read between 

 the lines there was given a key wherewith to unlock 

 the door to the solution of many biological problems. 

 Buffon, consequently, 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, 

 f he distinguished grandfather of Charles Darwin. 



Born at Elton, 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, 

 with 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, 

 eccentric doctor had arrived in the closing years of 

 his life. Krause's Life and Study of the Works of 

 Erasmus Darwin supplies an excellent outline of 

 the contents 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 is apparent in his writings, led him to reject 



