l fame, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who, while he
lived, enjoyed the widest popularity as a poet, the rhymed couplets
of his Botanic Garden being quoted everywhere with admiration. And
posterity repudiating the verse which makes the body of the book,
yet grants permanent value to the book itself, because, forsooth, its
copious explanatory foot-notes furnish an outline of the status of
almost every department of science of the time.

But even though he lacked the highest art of the versifier, Darwin had,
beyond peradventure, the imagination of a poet coupled with profound
scientific knowledge; and it was his poetic insight, correlating
organisms seemingly diverse in structure and imbuing the lowliest flower
with a vital personality, which led him to suspect that there are no
lines of demarcation in nature. "Can it be," he queries, "that one
form of organism has developed from another; that different species
are really but modified descendants of one parent stock?" The alluring
thought nestled in his mind and was nurtured there, and grew in a fixed
belief, which was given fuller expression in his Zoonomia and in the
posthumous Temple of Nature.

Here is his rendering of the idea as versified in the Temple of Nature:

"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born, and nursed in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

"Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main;
The lordly lion, monarch of the plain;
The eagle, soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye, undazzled, drinks the solar glare;
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God--
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point or microscopic ens!"(2)

Here, clearly enough, is the idea of evolution. But in that day there
was little proof forthcoming of its validity that could satisfy any
one but a poet, and when Erasmus Darwin died, in 1802, the idea of
transmutation of species was still but an unsubstantiated dream.

It was a dream, however, which was not co