22 CHARLES DARWIN 



verse about it which has doomed it to become since 

 Canning's parody a sort of warning beacon against the 

 worst faults of the post- Augustan decadence in the 

 ten-syllabled metre. Nobody now reads the ' Botanic 

 Garden' except either to laugh at its exquisite ex- 

 travagances, or to wonder at the queer tinsel glitter of 

 its occasional clever rhetorical rhapsodies. 



But iii his alternative character of philosophic 

 biologist, rejected by the age which swallowed his 

 poetry all applausive, Erasmus Darwin is well worthy 

 of the highest and deepest respect, as a prime founder 

 and early prophet of the evolutionary system. His 

 ' Zoonomia,' ' which, though ingenious, is built upon the 

 most absurd hypothesis ' as men still said only thirty 

 years ago contains in the germ the whole theory of 

 organic development as understood up to the very 

 moment of the publication of the ' Origin of Species/ 

 In it Dr. Darwin calls attention to ' the great changes 

 introduced into various animals by artificial or acci- 

 dental cultivation,' a subject afterwards fully elucidated 

 by his greater grandson in his work on ' The Variation 

 of Animals and Plants under Domestication.' He 

 specially notes ' the immense changes of shape and 

 colour' produced by man in rabbits and pigeons, the 

 very species on which Charles Darwin subsequently 

 made some of his most remarkable and interesting ob- 

 servations. More than any previous writer, Erasmus 

 Darwin, with ' prophetic sagacity,' insisted strongly on 

 the essential unity of parent and offspring a truth 

 which lies at the very base of all modern philosophical 

 biology. ' Owing to the imperfection of language/ 

 wrote the Lichfield doctor nearly a hundred years ago, 



