[150] Sur l’Influence du Monde ambiant, p. 74.

[151] Dictionnaire de la Conversation, xxxi., p. 487, 1836 (quoted by I. Geoffroy St. Hilaire); Histoire nat. gén. des Règnes organiques, ii., 2e partie; also Résumé, p. 30 (1859).

CHAPTER XIV
THE VIEWS OF ERASMUS DARWIN

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born in 1731, or twenty-four years after Buffon. He was an English country physician with a large practice, and not only interested in philosophy, mechanics, and natural science, but given to didactic rhyming, as evinced by The Botanical Garden and The Loves of the Plants, the latter of which was translated into French in 1800, and into Italian in 1805. His “shrewd and homely mind,” his powers of keen observation and strong common sense were revealed in his celebrated work Zoonomia, which was published in two volumes in 1794, and translated into German in 1795–99. He was not a zoölogist, published no separate scientific articles, and his striking and original views on evolution, which were so far in advance of his time, appear mostly in the section on “Generation,” comprising 173 pages of his Zoonomia,[152] which was mainly a medical work. The book was widely read, excited much discussion, and his views decided opposition. Samuel Butler in his Evolution, Old and New (1879) remarks: “Paley’s Natural Theology is written throughout at the Zoonomia, though he is careful, moro suo, never to mention this work by name. Paley’s success was probably one of the chief causes of the neglect into which the Buffonian and Darwinian systems fell in this country.” Dr. Darwin died in the same year (1802) as that in which the Natural Theology was published.

Krause also writes of the reception given by his contemporaries to his “physio-philosophical ideas.” “They spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression ‘Darwinising’ (as employed, for example, by the poet Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis of sober biological investigation.”[153]

The grandson of Erasmus Darwin had little appreciation of the views of him of whom, through atavic heredity, he was the intellectual and scientific child. “It is curious,” he says in the ‘Historical Sketch’ of the Origin of Species—“it is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his Zoonomia (vol. i., pp. 500–510), published in 1794.” It seems a little strange that Charles Darwin did not devote a few lines to stating just what his ancestor’s views were, for certain of them, as we shall see, are anticipations of his own.

The views of Erasmus Darwin may thus be summarily stated:

1. All animals have originated “from a single living filament” (p. 230), or, stated in other words, referring to the warm-blooded animals alone, “one is led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living filament” (p. 236); and again he expresses the conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life (p. 244). It does not follow that he was a “spermist,” since he strongly argued against the incasement or “evolution” theory of Bonnet.

2. Changes produced by differences of climate and even seasons. Thus “the sheep of warm climates are covered with hair instead of wool, and the hares and partridges of the latitudes which are long buried in snow become white during the winter months” (p. 234). Only a passing reference is made to this factor, and the effects of domestication are but cursorily referred to. In this respect Darwin’s views differed much from Buffon’s, with whom they were the primary causes in the modification of animals.