Chapter 13

PHILOSOPHY OF DR. ERASMUS DARWIN.

Considering the wide reputation enjoyed by Dr. Darwin at the beginning of this century, it is surprising how completely he has been lost sight of. The 'Botanic Garden' was translated into Portuguese in 1803; the 'Loves of the Plants' into French and Italian in 1800 and 1805; while, as I have already said, the 'Zoonomia' had appeared some years earlier in Germany. Paley's 'Natural Theology' is written throughout at the 'Zoonomia,' though he is careful, more 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 is as reticent about teleology as Buffon, and presumably for the same reason, but the evidence in favour of design was too obvious; Paley, therefore, with his usual keen-sightedness seized upon this weak point, and had the battle all his own way, for Dr. Darwin died the same year as that in which the 'Natural Theology' appeared. The unfortunate failure to see that evolution involves design and purpose as necessarily and far more intelligibly than the theological view of creation, has retarded our perception of many important facts for three-quarters of a century.

However this may be, Dr. Darwin's name has been but little before the public during the controversies of the last thirty years. Mr. Charles Darwin, indeed, in the "historical sketch" which he has prefixed to the later editions of his 'Origin of Species,' says, "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."[155] And a few lines lower Mr. Darwin adds, "It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which similar views arise at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire (as we shall immediately see) in France, came to the same conclusion on the 'Origin of Species' in the years 1794-1796." Acquaintance with Buffon's work will explain much of the singularity, while those who have any knowledge of the writings of Dr. Darwin and Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire will be aware that neither would admit the other as "coming to the same conclusion," or even nearly so, as himself. Dr. Darwin goes beyond his successor, Lamarck, while Étienne Geoffroy does not even go so far as Dr. Darwin's predecessor, Buffon, had thought fit to let himself be known as going. I have found no other reference to Dr. Darwin in the 'Origin of Species,' except the two just given from the same note. In the first edition I find no mention of him.

The chief fault to be found with Dr. Darwin's treatise on evolution is that there is not enough of it; what there is, so far from being "erroneous," is admirable. But so great a subject should have had a book to itself, and not a mere fraction of a