CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS 2$ 



' Organic life beneath the shoreless waves 

 Was born, and nursed 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.' 



Have we not here the very beginnings of Charles 

 Darwin ? Do we not see, in these profound and funda- 

 mental suggestions, not merely hints as to the evolu- 

 tion of evolution, but also as to the evolution of the 

 evolutionist ? 



On the other hand, though Erasmus Darwin defined 

 a fool to his friend Edgeworth as ' a man who never 

 tried an experiment in his life,' he was wanting himself 

 in the rigorous and patient inductive habit which so 

 strikingly distinguished his grandson Charles. That 

 trait, as we shall presently see, the biological chief of 

 the nineteenth century derived in all probability from 

 another root of his genealogical tree. Erasmus Darwin 

 gave us brilliant suggestions rather than cumulative 

 proof : he apologised in his ( Zoonomia ' for ' many con- 

 jectures not supported by accurate investigation or con- 

 clusive experiments.' Such an apology would have 

 been simply impossible to the painstaking spirit of his 

 grandson Charles. 



Erasmus Darwin was twice married. His first wife 

 was Mary, daughter of Mr. Charles Howard, of Lichfield, 

 and it was her son, Robert Waring Darwin, who be- 

 came the father of our hero, Charles. It is fashionable 

 to say, in this and sundry other like cases, that the 

 mental energy skips a generation. People have said so 



