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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
domain of biology. For in him we find the same indefatigable spirit of 
research, and almost the same biological tendency, as in his grandson ; and we 
might, not without justice, assert that the latter has succeeded to an 
intellectual inheritance, and carried out a programme sketched forth and left 
behind by his grandfather.’ 
* But, at the same time, we remark a material difference in their interpre- 
tation 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, and it is to Darwin therefore that 
the credit is due of having first established a complete system of the theory of 
evolution.’ Clearly such a man as this deserves to be rescued from the com- 
parative oblivion into which he had fallen, and we are glad to see that two 
writers have in this same year tried to do justice to this English worthy. 
It is hardly necessary to say that the fife of Erasmus Darwin as a 
successful physician in a provincial town passed without any striking 
incidents. What is to be told, however, is told here by Mr. Darwin in an 
exceedingly pleasant style, and he naturally devotes his attention rather to 
the delineation of his grandfather’s character than to the thankless task of 
giving full details of a somewhat uneventful life. Nevertheless, the few 
incidents narrated, and especially the quotations given from letters, are full 
of interest for those who like to realize as far as possible the modes of life 
and thought prevalent at a time so near our own, and yet so widely separated 
from us. 
Erasmus Darwin was descended from a family of landed gentry in 
Lincolnshire, and w r as born on the 12th of December, 1731, at Elston Hall, 
in Nottinghamshire. He early displayed a great fondness for poetry, and 
also for mechanical pursuits, both of which tastes he preserved to the end of 
his life ; and when very young, according to his elder brother, Robert, he 
used to show little experiments in electricity with a rude apparatus he then 
invented with a bottle. In 1750 he was entered at St. John’s College, 
Cambridge, and took a respectable degree in that university in 1754. In the 
autumn of the latter year he went to Edinburgh to study medicine, returned 
to Cambridge in 1755 to take his degree of Bachelor of Medicine, then went 
again to Edinburgh, whence he returned in September, 1756, and settled as 
a physician in Nottingham. Being unsuccessful in that city, he removed in 
two or three months to Lichfield, where, owing to the reputation made for 
him by two or three successful cases, he speedily got into good practice. At 
Lichfield he remained for twenty-five years, and then removed to Derby, where 
he died on April 18, 1802. Dr. Darwin was twice married, first to a Miss 
Howard, whom he lost after thirteen years of married life, and secondly to 
a widow lady, for whom he appears to have entertained a strong passion 
even during the fife of her first husband, and who survived him. 
Of his grandfather’s character Mr. Darwin speaks very unreservedly, but 
on the whole, sums up, and justly, in his favour. As he says, i There is, 
perhaps, no safer test of a man’s real character than that of his long-continued 
friendship with good and able men.’ Darwin’s intimate and almost life-long 
friends were such men as Josiah Wedgwood, Keir, the chemist, Day, the 
author of Sandf(/rd and Merton (are any of the rising generation, we wonder, 
acquainted with Harry, and Tommy, and that wonderful Mr. Barlow?), 
