42 EVOLUTION 



pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by im- 

 mensely changing their shapes and colours. If man can make 

 a pouter or a fantail out of the common runt, if he can pro- 

 duce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild rabbit, if he 

 can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot 

 Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to 

 try with, produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out 

 of one single common ancestor ? It was a bold idea of the 

 Lichfield doctor bold, at least, for the times he lived in 

 when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and physical 

 speculation was regarded askance as having hi it a dangerous 

 touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold 

 folk, and had the courage of their opinions more than 

 most men. So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, 

 and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus 

 Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadru- 

 peds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent 

 descendants of a single similar original form, and even that 

 ' one and the same kind of living filament is, and has been, 

 the cause of organic life.' 



The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always 

 laughed at all reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very 

 clever, but really a most eccentric man. His ' Temple of 

 Nature,' now, and his ' Botanic Garden,' were vastly fine 

 and charming poems those sweet lines, you know, about 

 poor Eliza ! but his zoological theories were built of course 

 upon a most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, 

 no sensible person could ever take the doctor seriously. A 

 freak of genius nothing more ; a mere desire to seem 

 clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of 

 time has brought around with it ! By a strange irony of 

 fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely for- 

 gotten ; poor Eliza has survived only as our awful example 

 of artificial pathos ; and the zoological heresies, at which 



