REVIEWS. 
71 
Boulton, and Watt, tlie engineers, and Mr. Edgeworth. He appears to have 
been incessantly active, kindly, although sometimes sarcastic, liberal in his 
practice, and very free from what is usually considered as one of the 
weaknesses of a poet, vanity. His feelings towards his children have been 
represented by his female biographer, Miss Seward, as not of the most 
amiable character ; and some of his letters to them show a curious coldness : 
but Mr. Darwin proves clearly, indeed from that lady’s own admission, that 
there was no truth in the most repulsive of her stories, and he accounts for 
her ready acceptance of so much that told to the disadvantage of Dr. Darwin, 
by the motive of disappointed affection, the lady having, it appears, 
manifested a strong desire to marry the doctor after the decease of his first 
wife. After his death she probably thought that a little spite could do him 
no harm, while it would certainly be a stab for her successful rival ; and it 
would appear that Mr. Darwin’s father was in possession of documents 
connected with the doctor’s relations with Miss Seward, which he thought 
it would be unpleasant for her to have published. 
What Mr. Darwin modestly calls his Preliminary Notice to the translation 
from Dr. Krause’s essay occupies about three-fifths of the little volume that he 
has published in commemoration of his grandfather, and we fear that we have 
followed his example in the present notice. We, have, however, already 
indicated in general terms, borrowed from Dr. Krause’s essay, what was 
the character of Dr. Darwin’s philosophical work, and the essay on his 
scientific labours is even in the original so condensed that we could hardly 
do justice to it without transferring the greater part to our pages. 1 Almost 
every single work of the younger Darwin,’ says Dr. Krause, ‘ 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 discussed in the writings of the elder Darwin.’ It is to be remarked, 
however, that Dr. Darwin nowhere gives his ideas on the nature and evolution 
of organisms in 3, connected form, but the arguments and details are scattered 
profusely through the notes appended to his various didactic poems, and 
only partially brought together more closely in some parts of his great prose 
work, the Zoonomia. But even in these scattered notices we recognize, as 
indeed is remarked by Dr. Krause, the most wonderful resemblances between 
the elder Darwin and his still more distinguished descendant. In both we 
see the same philosophical breadth of view, combined with the same 
extraordinary power of grasping and bringing together an immense mass of 
details from the most varied sources to support and illustrate the argument 
under discussion — in fact, the same qualities which most strike us in Mr. 
■ Darwin’s work are the most prominent characteristics of his grandfather’s, 
and their exercise led both to approximately the same result. That is to say, 
Erasmus Darwin, equally with Charles Darwin, arrived evidently at a belief 
in the origin of the diversity of organized forms by a process of evolution 
one from the other, but the former regarded this process as brought about 
by internal impulses, at least semi-conscious, rather than by the action of 
external conditions giving rise to a process of natural selection under the 
struggle for existence. 
