8 Unconscious Memory 



and reflecting upon all sorts of facts which could possibly 

 have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed 

 myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short 

 notes ; these I enlarged in 1 844 into a sketch of the conclusions 

 which then seemed to me probable : from that period to the 

 present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope 

 that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, 

 as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming 

 to a decision."! 



In the latest edition this passage remains unaltered, 

 except in one unimportant respect. What could more 

 completely throw us off the scent of the earlier writers ? 

 If they had written anything worthy of our attention, or 

 indeed if there had been any earlier writers at all, Mr. 

 Darwin would have been the first to tell us about them, 

 and to award them their due meed of recognition. But, 

 no ; the whole thing was an original growth in Mr. Dar- 

 win's mind, and he had never so much as heard of his 

 grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin. 



Dr. Krause, indeed, thought otherwise. In the number 

 of Kosmos for February 1879 he represented Mr. Darwin 

 as in his youth approaching the works of his grandfather 

 with all the devotion which people usually feel for the 

 writings of a renowned poet.^ This should perhaps be a 

 delicately ironical way of hinting that Mr. Darwin did 

 not read his grandfather's books closely ; but I hardly 

 think that Dr. Krause looked at the matter in this light, 

 for he goes on to say that " 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 protective arrangements of animals and 

 plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the 

 analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses ; nay, 

 even the studies on infants are to be found already dis- 

 cussed in the pages of the elder Darwin." ^ 



' Origin of Species, ed. i., p. 1. 



^ Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397. 



' Erasmus Darwin, by Ernest Krause, pp. 132, 133. 



