THE DAWN OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 233 



grandson to prove how numerous, varied, and complex 

 are the contrivances by which many plants attract insects, 

 for the purpose of having their seeds fertilised. 



In another passage, Erasmus Darwin makes special 

 note of the extraordinarily rapid multiplication of living 

 beings, and he recognised that the great majority of 

 the young of each species must of necessity perish 

 before reaching maturity. In this, however, he saw 

 nothing more than a provision of nature to prevent the 

 species, as a species, from suffering extinction. He 

 failed, therefore, just at the point where Charles 

 Darwin succeeded; and he does not appear to have 

 suspected that it is this fact which forms the starting- 

 point of the long series of causes concerned in the 

 origination of new species. No traces, in fact, of the 

 law of ' Natural Selection,' as subsequently set forth 

 by Charles Darwin, can be detected in his utterances 

 upon this subject 



With regard to the general conclusions at which 

 Erasmus Darwin arrived, he concluded that 'all animals 

 have a common origin, namely from a single living 

 filament, and that the difference of their forms and 

 qualities has arisen only from the different irritabilities 

 and sensibilities, or voluntarities, or associabilities, of 

 this original living filament.' Hence he thought it 

 ' not impossible but the great variety of species of animals 

 which now tenant the earth may have had their origin 

 from the mixture of a few natural orders.' Indeed, 

 he goes further than this would imply, since he says 

 in a later passage : ' From thus meditating on the great 

 similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, 



