THE DAWN OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 225 



strong leaning towards poetry, which in later life he was 

 enabled to indulge, not altogether to the advantage of his 

 reputation. To quote Mr Grant Allen once more, his 

 poetry, ' though ingenious as everything else he did, had a 

 certain false gallop of 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.' Erasmus Darwin's 

 poetical works, however, though not worthy of preservation 

 as specimens of poetical art, derive a historical interest 

 from the scientific conceptions which they embody. The 

 best known of them is the curious treatise entitled * The 

 Botanic Garden.' The second part of this singular lucubra- 

 tion appeared anonymously in 1788, under the name of 

 'The Loves of the Plants;' the first part, entitled 'The 

 Economy of Vegetation,' not having been published till 

 1790. * The Botanic Garden ' dealt, in poetical fashion, with 

 the life of plants, and it was at first received with much 

 favour by the public, though its popularity was short- 

 lived, and at the present day it is probably never read 

 at all. 



Erasmus Darwin's most famous and really most 

 important work was, however, his ' Zoonomia, or the Laws 

 of Organic Life,' the first edition of which was published 

 in London (1794-96), in two volumes quarto. The 

 special interest of this work lies in the fact that in it can 

 be traced the foreshadowing of a large portion of the 

 modern theory of the evolution of living beings. In so 

 far, therefore, as this is the case, it may be fairly claimed 



* Canning wrote a parody upon Erasmus Darwin's ' Loves of the Plants ' with 

 the title ' Loves of the Triangles.' 



O 



