6 The History of Evolutionism, [January* 
touch without showing wherein he differs from his illustrious 
grandson. 
As Dr. Krause very aptly remarks, “ It is one thing to 
establish hypotheses and theories out of the fulness of one’s 
fancy, even when supported by a very considerable know- 
ledge of Nature, and another to demonstrate them by an 
enormous number of faCts, and carry them to such, a degree 
of probability as to satisfy those most capable of judging.” 
Erasmus Darwin, along with a number of most valuable 
observations and suggestions, lays before us — as was in his 
day inevitable — not a few puerile and unfounded hypotheses. 
Thus he puts in the mouth of a philosophic friend the con- 
jecture that the first inserts had proceeded from a meta- 
morphosis of the honey-loving stamens and pistils of the 
flowers by their separation from the parent plant, after the 
fashion of the male flowers of Vallisneria. He believed 
that, as far as possible, flowers are adapted for self-fertilisa- 
tion, and even stigmatises cross-fertilisation as “ adulterous.” 
Probably, however, his greatest weakness lies in the agency 
to which he ascribes the gradual transformation of organisms. 
Like his successor, Lamarck, he depends here on the con- 
scious and intentional attempts of each being to adapt itself 
to changing circumstances. He declares that all warm- 
blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which 
the great first cause endued with animality, with the 
power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propen- 
sities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and asso- 
ciations ; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing, to 
improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering 
down those improvements by generation to its posterity, 
world without end.” This idea is by no means unsuitable 
as far as animals are concerned ; but with strict logical 
consistency its author applied it also to the development of 
plants, and thus became, as Dr. Krause maintains, the most 
formidable critic of his own system. If we are to suppose 
plants consciously attempting to adapt themselves . to 
changing conditions, we are ultimately driven to assign 
them a sensorium, and, as the composite vegetable body is 
not unlike a coral-stock, this sensorium must be ascribed to 
every bud. These difficulties, it is scarcely needful to say, 
the younger Darwin evades by his hypothesis of Natural 
Selection. The individual which— without any intention or 
consciousness on its own part, and by a mere accidental 
variation — is in better accord with external circumstances 
than are its neighbours, has the better chance of surviving 
them, and of leaving a progeny. Doubting, as we do, the 
