ins were always a bold folk, and had the
courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,
cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth
century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that
quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants
of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind
of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.'

The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at all
reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most
eccentric man. His 'Temple of Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,'
were vastly fine and charming poems--those sweet lines, you know, about
poor Eliza!--but his zoological theories were built of course upon a
most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could
ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius--nothing more; a mere
desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of
time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those
admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has
survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the
zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat
shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be
the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.

In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed Erasmus
Darwin's lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals and
plants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He held
that organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculous
interposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena around
us generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from
what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little
more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners
elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many
cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of
it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and
the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society
still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one
point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of c