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ERASMUS DARWIN |
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The Dolomites, 'mighty monuments of past delight' (see right-hand column) |
Erasmus Darwin was a genius, but more than that, he was a likeable and thoroughly decent human being, unassuming despite the celebrity he achieved, a devoted husband and father, a loyal friend, and a character. He was enormously fat, he was talkative, he was witty, he stammered. He was restless, creative, inventive. For a time he was regarded as the finest poet of his age, admired by Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Shelleys; as a botanist he published a theory of evolution sixty years before his grandson, Charles; as a scientist he was the first to propound two of the fundamental laws of gases, to explain how clouds form and how artesian wells work; as an engineer, he designed the steering mechanism used in all modern cars. On the Continent he is recognised as one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, alongside Rousseau and Goethe. He fathered fourteen children, including two whilst he was 'between wives' (his first wife having died in childbirth). But all that was just in his spare time; he earned his living as a good, caring and compassionate doctor, tirelessly travelling 10,000 miles a year on the terrible roads of eighteenth century England to attend his patients. Erasmus Darwin was born in 1731 at Elston, near Newark. His father was a lawyer. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities, the latter having at that time the leading medical school in the British Isles. Having tried and failed to establish a medical practice in Nottingham, he moved to Lichfield in 1756. Shortly after his arrival there he saved the life of a young gentleman by means of a novel course of treatment and from then on, the success of his practice was assured. The following year he married Mary (Polly) Howard, by whom he had four sons and a daughter. The youngest of those sons, Robert, was to become Charles Darwin's father. The family moved to a big house on the edge of the Cathedral close in Lichfield, which is now open to the public as the Erasmus Darwin Museum. Shortly
after moving to Lichfield Erasmus Darwin became friendly with Matthew
Boulton and, as the Lunar Circle gradually coalesced, he was one of its
founding members, and a most enthusiastic member at that. He got
involved in canal-building schemes and invented an improved canal lock.
Aside from his improvements in carriage design and especially steering,
he was the first to suggest the
development of internal combustion engines using hydrogen as a fuel (which
might yet become commonplace), and to suggest hydrogen-oxygen rocket
motors, which were finally introduced in the Saturn rocket almost 200
years later. He advocated the treatment of
cataracts by the method now used (though he did not attempt any
operations himself). The first to explain how clouds form, and to
describe warm and cold fronts and their influence on the weather, he was
also the first to advocate the plotting of weather maps. His
descriptions of the upper layers of the atmosphere were not bettered
until the 1950s. In his wilder flights (sorry!)
of inventive fancy he even speculated on the feasibility of
steam-powered aeroplanes: Soon
shall thy arm, Unconquer'd Steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.
Whilst
it hasn't worked out exactly like that, he was a hundred years ahead of
his time in envisaging the possibility of air travel and the role of
aircraft in warfare. In another passage he anticipated submarines. In 1779 he
invented a mechanical copying machine, which caused what was written
with one pen to be replicated by a second, linked pen. It remains the
only copying machine ever invented capable of producing a copy
indistinguishable from the original. He
worked on a speaking machine which reportedly did a convincing
impression of a child saying 'mama' and 'papa', but he never collected
the thousand pounds that Matthew Boulton teasingly offered if he could develop his
machine to the point where it could recite the Lord's Prayer, the Creed
and the Ten Commandments. He kept a commonplace book, in which he made
notes and sketches of many more inventive ideas, very reminiscent of
Leonardo da Vinci's famous sketches. Tireless,
from the mid 1770s Erasmus Darwin constructed a botanical garden near
his Lichfield home, where he carried out botanical research. He wrote
six books, including a translation of the Linnaean system of botany,
which he popularised in a saucy poem entitled Loves of the Plants,
made all the more racy by giving the plants human personalities (he
believed that plants feel, though less keenly than animals). In
a 630-page book on botany, entitled Phytologia, he made major
strides in the understanding of plant physiology, photosynthesis and
plant nutrition, recognising for the first time the key roles that nitrogen, phosphorus and
carbon play in plant growth. By showing how agricultural productivity could be increased, he laid the foundations of scientific agriculture. His
1300-page book on animal life, Zoonomia, was in part a
surprisingly modern medical tract, in which he dealt not just with
physical ailments, but also with psychological and social afflictions
such as depression, delusion and religious mania. This book also
sketched out, for the first time, a theory of
evolution in which the only role for a god was that of 'great first
cause'. He conjectured that all living things are ultimately descended
from a single microscopic ancestor (which is the modern scientific
orthodoxy). Beyond that, he argued, evolution has been driven by 'the
three great objects of desire' - sexual lust, hunger and security. To a
greater or lesser extent, depending on the species, lust leads to the
dominant males propagating the species, thus improving it. This is the
essence of natural selection. The need for food has led different
species to develop different characteristics, adapted to their preferred
diet, and here he cites as examples the elephant's trunk or the hard beaks
that some birds have developed. Considerations of security have similarly led
to different adaptations, such as flight, speed, camouflage or protective shells. He
summed all this up in the following passage: 'Would it
be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time since the earth
began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the
history of mankind, ... that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from
one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality,
with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities,
directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and
thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent
activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generations to its
posterity .. !' (Note his use of an exclamation, rather than
a question, mark.) In its day this was highly controversial
and widely rejected, not only by the Christian churches, which
maintained their belief that God had created species which were
immutable, but also by much of the scientific establishment, which at
that time held similar views. Almost as controversial was the great antiquity Darwin attributed
to the earth, which was generally believed at that time to be less than
6000 years old. He found himself alone; no-one came forward to support him, and he was widely
condemned for his views. In
1781 Erasmus Darwin married Elizabeth Pole, an attractive widow who was
to bear him another seven children, and went to live at her home near
Derby, and later in Derby itself. On account of the travelling that would have been involved, this
brought to an end his active involvement in the Lunar Society, although
he continued to correspond with several of its members. Erasmus
Darwin's last work, a great book-length poem published posthumously in
1803, The Temple of Nature, expanded on the views published in Zoonomia
on the development of life on earth, telling in verse the story of the evolution of
life from primitive beginnings to the present day: Organic
life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd 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.
The
Temple of Nature is a remarkable achievement, setting out a theory which was not
scientifically accepted for another hundred years, and then only after
long argument, yet is now seen as correct in all its essentials. Erasmus
Darwin died in 1802, aged 70, at
Breadsall Priory, a house
near Derby to which the family had moved only weeks earlier. Footnote.
It would be sixty years after Erasmus Darwin's death before the
publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by his grandson,
Charles Darwin, began to lead to the gradual acceptance by most people that
evolution by natural selection provided the best explanation of the
development of life on earth. Working largely from first principles,
drawing mainly on evidence amassed independently, and
without acknowledging any debt to Erasmus (although he was, of course,
aware of his grandfather's work), Charles Darwin came to conclusions
very close to his grandfather's, to which he added relatively little; indeed, he was
wrong on a few points that we now know Erasmus got right.
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LINKS Other sites: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6) , (7), (8), (9)
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