THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



plants and animals about us have been evolved from 

 fewer and fewer earlier parent types, like twigs of a 

 giant tree drawing their nurture from the same primal 



ERASMUS DARWIN 



root. It was a bold and revolutionary thought; and 

 the world regarded it as but the vagary of a poet. 



Just at the time when this thought was taking form 

 in Goethe's brain, the same idea was germinating in the 

 mind of another philosopher, an Englishman of interna- 

 tional fame, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who, while he lived, 

 enjoyed the widest popularity as a poet, the rhymed 

 couplets of his Botanic Garden being quoted every- 



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