DARWIN, ERASMUS

DARWIN, ERASMUS, physician, natural philosopher, and didactic poet, was born 12th December 1731, at Elston Hall, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire; entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1750, graduated B.A. in 1754, and afterwards studied medicine at Edinburgh. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a practice at Nottingham, he removed to Lichfield, where he married and became a popular physician and prominent figure from his ability, his radical and free-thinking opinions, his poetry, his eight-acre botanical garden, and his imperious advocacy of temperance in drinking. After his second marriage in 1781, he settled in Derby, and then at Breadsall Priory, where he died suddenly 18th April 1802. Darwin had once a great reputation as a physiologist, but his system is, for the most part, inconsequent, baseless, and untenable. At the same time, many of his ideas are original, suggestive, and contain within them the germs of important truths. His strength and his weakness lay in his faculty for seeing analogies in nature. Sometimes he is exceedingly happy in his discoveries; at other times he is quite fantastical. The same remarks hold good as regards his verse, where, amid the frequent extravagance and incomprehensibility of his notions, there burst forth strains of genuine poetry. The Loves of the Plants (1789), a part of his chief poem, the Botanic Garden, was happily burlesqued in the 'Loves of the Triangles' in the Anti-Jacobin. Interest in Darwin's speculations has been revived by the recognition of his partial anticipation of Lamarck's views on evolution, and so of his own famous grandson's. His chief works are Zoönomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96); and his Phytologia, or Philosophy of Agriculture (1799). See his Life by Kranse, trans. by Dallas (1879). By his first wife he was grandfather of Charles Darwin; by his second, of Francis Galton.