202 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) 



Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great 

 naturahst, is one of the most interesting figures 

 in our present history. In his volumes of verse 

 we find that he is one of the poets of the evolution 

 idea, following Empedocles and Lucretius and 

 followed by the greater poet Goethe. His early 

 writings were the Botanic Garden and Loves of 

 the Plants, two volumes of verse completed and 

 published about 1790, and his Zoonomia, a large 

 medico-philosophical work published in 1794. In 

 the Temple of Nature, of the year 1802 memo- 

 rable for coincidences, published after his death, 

 he gives in poetical form the ideas which had ma- 

 tured during the last ten years of his life. 



We owe to Ernst Krause a careful study of 

 the works of Eramus Darwin, originally pub- 

 lished in Kosmos, and subsequently translated 

 into English with a biography of Erasmus Dar- 

 win written by Charles Darwin. Krause, how- 

 ever, in his admirable biography, fails to give 

 Darwin's predecessors sufficient credit; his ideas, 

 it is true, were partly gathered from his own 

 notes as a physician and as a lifelong observer of 

 Nature, but they indicate also a very careful 

 reading of Leibnitz, as in his allusion to the 

 change of genera in the Ammonites ; to Buff on, 

 as in ideas connected with the struggle for ex- 



