246 



NATURE 



{Jan. 15, 1 ! 



Coleridge invented the term " Darwinising" to express 

 his contempt for the speculations of the elder Darwin, 

 and the Edinburgh Review treated his poems in its well- 

 known " this-will-never-do" style. Still Darwin's poems 

 contain many brilliant passages, yet we fear no reader of 

 the present day would care to read them through merely 

 as literary productions. Any one, however, who desires 

 to master the history of the progress of scientific theory, 

 must study them carefully; and this is what Herr Krause 

 has done in order to be able to write the critical essay 

 appended to the biography by Mr. Darwin, an essay 

 which Mr. Dallas has turned into excellent English. 



Herr Krause, then, claims for Erasmus Darwin that he 

 is the real father of the doctrine of evolution in its 

 modern form, and that much of the credit which has 

 been ascribed to Lamarck is really due to his predecessor. 

 No one can read Herr Krause' s careful paper, fortified as 

 it is with numerous extracts from the elder Darwin's 

 works, without being convinced that the claim he upholds 

 is just. True, Darwin often saw as in a glass darkly, 

 what his greater grandson has been able to see and to 

 show us face to face. But when we remember the state 

 of scientific theory in his time, and the scanty store of 

 data at his command, we cannot but be struck with the 

 real penetrative genius of the man, and wonder that he 

 was able to see so much. His powerful and thoroughly 

 scientific imagination helped him to leap over many dif- 

 ficulties, which the Darwin of to-day has been able to 

 bridge by an abundance of fresh facts. As might be 

 expected, the elder Darwin's ideas are sometimes crude 

 and undeveloped ; when he seems in a fair way to arrive 

 at the full-blown ideas connected with the doctrine of 

 evolution such as we have it now, he sometimes turns 

 aside ere the goal is reached, and concludes with some- 

 thing that is only half the truth. Here is how Herr 

 Krause speaks of him : — 



"I was speedily convinced that this man, equally 

 eminent as philanthropist, physician, naturalist, philoso- 

 pher, and poet, is far less known and valued by posterity 

 than he deserves, in comparison with other persons who 

 occupy a similar rank. It is true that what is perhaps 

 the most important of his many-sided endowments, 

 namely, his broad view of the philosophy of nature, was 

 not intelligible to his contemporaries ; it is only now, 

 after the lapse of a hundred years, that by the labours of 

 one of his descendants we are in a position to estimate 

 at its true value the wonderful perceptivity, amounting 

 almost to divination, that he displayed in the domain of 

 biology. For in him we find the same indefatigable 

 spirit of research, and almost the same biological ten- 

 dency, as in his grandson ; and we might, not without 

 justice, assert that the latter has succeeded to an intellec- 

 tual inheritance, and carried out a programme sketched 

 forth and left behind by his grandfather. 



"Almost every single work of the younger Darwin may- 

 be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his 

 ancestor ; the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the pro- 

 tective arrangements of animals and plants, sexual selec- 

 tion, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions 

 and sociological impulses ; nay, even the studies on in- 

 fants are to be found already discussed in the writings of 

 the elder Darwin. But at the same time we remark a 

 material difference in their interpretation of nature. The 

 elder Darwin was a Lamarckian, or, more properly, Jean 

 Lamarck was a Darwinian of the older school, for he has 

 only carried out further the ideas of Erasmus Darwin, 

 although with great acumen ; and it is to Darwin, there- 



fore, that the credit is due of having first established a 

 complete system of the theory of evolution." 



Herr Krause then proceeds to analyse "The Botanic 

 Garden " and other works, in order to produce evidence 

 of the claim he maintains on behalf of Erasmus Darwin. 

 It is interesting to read in a note appended by Darwin to 

 a verse in " The Botanic Garden," the following idea and 

 first scheme of the theory of evolution : — 



" ' From having observed the gradual evolution of the 

 young animal or plant from its egg or seed ; and after- 

 wards its successive advances to its more perfect state, or 

 maturity ; philosophers of all ages seem to have imagined 

 that the great world itself had likewise its infancy and its 

 gradual progress to maturity ; this seems to have given 

 origin to the very antient and sublime allegory of Eros, 

 or Divine love, producing the world from the egg of 

 Night, as it floated in chaos.' " 



It is in the " Economy of Vegetation " that the well- 

 known prophetic lines on the power of steam occur : — 



" ' Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer'd Steam, afar 

 Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car ; 

 Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear 

 The flying-chariot through the fields of air. 



Fair crews, triumphant, leaning from above, 



Shall wave their flutt'ring kerchiefs as they move ; 



Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd, 



And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.' '' 



Darwin goes on then to describe the formation of the 

 earth, which he maintains was shot forth from a volcano 

 in the sun, the formation of a nucleus, the precipitation 

 of water, the formation of clouds, &c. : — 



" In this connection the fossil marine animals also 

 come under discussion; and after mentioning the singular 

 circumstance that most fossil marine animals as, for 

 example, the ammonites, are no longer found living, 

 whilst the living animals do not occur in the fossil state, 

 the author raises the questions, ' Were all the ammonia: 

 destroyed when the continents were raised ? Or do some 

 genera of animals perish by the increasing power of their 

 enemies ? Or do they still reside at inaccessible depths 

 in the sea? Or do some animals change their forms 

 gradually and become new genera ?'" 



How very near the now accepted truth is this ! While 

 he divined the principle of mimicry in plants, and specu- 

 lated on the interesting subject of their fertilisation 

 and their relation to insects, he here just missed the 

 truth from his want of knowledge of facts ; had he 

 had as much power of patient observation as his grand- 

 son, he would have come nearer the truth in this matter. 

 While he held even bold speculation to be of value to 

 science, he distinctly recognised observation and experi- 

 ment as the only true bases of scientific progress, as will 

 be seen in his admirable address to the Philosophical 

 Society of Derby, of which he was one of the founders ; 

 he defined a fool as " A man who never tried an experi- 

 ment in his life." The fundamental idea of Darwin's 

 "Zoonomia," it seems to Herr Krause — 



" Is that in plants and animals a living force is at work, 

 which, endowed in both with sensibility, is enabled 

 spontaneously to adapt them to the circumstances of the 

 outer world, so that the assumption of innate ideas, of 

 divinely implanted impulses and instincts is rendered 

 unnecessary, and even the process of thought appears 

 attainable as the legitimate activity of a mechanical 

 analysis and combination. All kinds of human know- 

 ledge originate from the senses, the action of which is 



