e, which necessarily produced allusions to classical
literature; by these, he discovered that I had received the education of
a gentleman. 'Why! I thought,' said the Doctor, 'that you were a
coach-maker!' 'That was the reason,' said I, 'that you looked surprised at
finding me at supper with Mrs. Darwin. But you see, Doctor, how superior
in discernment ladies are even to the most learned gentlemen: I assure
you that I had not been in the room five minutes before Mrs. Darwin
asked me to tea!'"

These endeavours to improve the construction of carriages were near
costing him dear; nor did he desist till he had been several times
thrown down, and at last broke the pan of the right knee, which
occasioned a slight but incurable lameness. The amiable woman, of whom
Mr. Edgeworth has here spoken, died in 1770. Of the five children whom
she brought him, two were lost in their infancy. Charles, the eldest of
the remaining three, died at Edinburgh, in 1778, of a disease supposed
to be communicated by a corpse which he was dissecting, when one of his
fingers was slightly wounded. He had obtained a gold medal for pointing
out a test by which pus might be distinguished from mucus; and the Essay
in which he had stated his discovery was published by his father after
his death, together with another treatise, which he left incomplete, on
the Retrograde Motions of the Absorbent Vessels of Animal Bodies in some
Diseases. Another of his sons, Erasmus, who was a lawyer, in a temporary
fit of mental derangement put an end to his existence, in 1799. Robert
Waring, a physician, now in high reputation at Shrewsbury, is the only
one of these children who survived him.

A few years before he quitted Lichfield, in consequence of a second
marriage, he attempted to establish a Botanical Society in that city;
but his only associates were the present Sir Brooke Boothby, and a
proctor whose name was Jackson. Of this triumvirate, Miss Seward, who
knew them well, tells us that Jackson admired Sir Brooke Boothby, and
worshipped and aped Dr. Darwin. He became a useful drudge to each in
their joint work, the translation of the Linnaean system of vegetation
into English from the Latin. His illustrious coadjutors exacted of him
fidelity to the sense of their author, and they corrected Jackson's
inelegant English, weeding it of its pompous coarseness. Darwin had
already conceived the design of turning the Linnaean system into a poem,
which, after he had compos