A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



edge; and it was his poetic insight, correlating organ- 

 isms seemingly diverse in structure and imbuing the 

 lowliest flower with a vital personality, which led him 

 to suspect that there are no lines of demarcation in 

 nature. "Can it be," he queries, "that one form of 

 organism has developed from another; that different 

 species are really but modified descendants of one 

 parent stock?" The alluring thought nestled in his 

 mind and was nurtured there, and grew in a fixed be- 

 lief, which was given fuller expression in his Zoonomia 

 and in the posthumous Temple of Nature. 



Here is his rendering of the idea as versified in the 

 Temple of Nature: 



"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves 

 Was born, and nursed in Ocean's pearly caves; 

 First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, 

 Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; 

 These, as successive generations bloom, 

 New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; 

 Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, 

 And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. 



"Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood, 

 Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood; 

 The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main; 

 The lordly lion, monarch of the plain; 

 The eagle, soaring in the realms of air, 

 Whose eye, undazzled, drinks the solar glare; 

 Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, 

 Of language, reason, and reflection proud, 

 With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod, 

 And styles himself the image of his God 

 Arose from rudiments of form and sense, 

 An embryon point or microscopic ens!" 2 

 148 



