CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS 21 



ing Hunter's lectures in London, besides going through 

 the regular medical course at Edinburgh, the young 

 doctor finally settled down as a physician at Nottingham, 

 whence shortly afterward he removed to Lichfield, then 

 the centre of a famous literary coterie. So large a part 

 of Charles Darwin's remarkable idiosyncrasy was derived 

 by heredity from his paternal grandfather, that it may be 

 worth while to dwell a little here in passing on the 

 character and career of this brilliant precursor of the 

 great evolutionist. Both in the physical and in the 

 spiritual sense, Erasmus Darwin was one among the 

 truest and most genuine ancestors of his grandson 

 Charles. 



A powerful, robust, athletic man, in florid health 

 and of temperate habits, yet with the full-blooded ten- 

 dency of the eighteenth century vividly displayed in his 

 ample face and broad features, Erasmus Darwin bubbled 

 over with irrepressible vivacity, the outward and visible 

 sign of that overflowing energy which forms everywhere 

 one of the most marked determining conditions of high 

 genius. Strong in body and strong in mind, a tee- 

 totaler before teetotalism, an abolitionist before the anti- 

 slavery movement, he had a great contempt for weak- 

 nesses and prejudices of every soi - t, and he rose far 

 superior to the age in which he lived in breadth of view 

 and freedom from preconceptions. The eighteenth cen- 

 tury considered him, in its cautious, cut-and-dried 

 fashion, a man of singular talent but of remarkably 

 eccentric and unsafe opinions. Unfortunately for his 

 lasting fame, Dr. Darwin was much given to writing 

 poetry ; and this poetry, though as ingenious as every- 

 thing else he did, had a certain false gallop of 



