EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 203 



istence and variations under artificial selection; 

 to Linnaeus, Blumenthal, and others; as to the 

 origin of life, he drew poetically from the Greeks, 

 especially from Aristotle, limiting spontaneous 

 generation, however, to the lowest organisms. 

 The Greeks also gave him the fundamental 

 idea of Evolution, for he says, "This idea of 

 the gradual formation and improvement of the 

 Animal world seems not to have been unknown 

 to the ancient philosophers." His general phi- 

 losophy of Nature, as under the operation of 

 natural laws rather than of the supernatural, he 

 himself in the Zoonornia attributes to David 

 Hume. His view of the origin of adaptations or 

 of design in Nature was thoroughly naturalistic ; 

 he believed that adaptations had not been spe- 

 cially created, but that they had been naturally 

 and gradually acquired by powers of develop- 

 ment planted within the original organisms by 

 the Creator. 



Passages from TJie Temple of Nature indicate 

 that in his latest writings Darwin was a firm 

 evolutionist even as to the descent of man, and 

 that he had advanced considerably beyond the 

 tentative views expressed many years before in 

 the Zoonomia and Botanic Garden. Krause has 

 selected many of these passages from the Temple 

 of Nature, Erasmus Darwin's epic of Evolu- 

 tion, opening with his presentation of the Greek 



