SOURCE: “Erasmus Darwin,” in Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets, Macmillan, 1986, pp. 4-34.

[In the following excerpt, King-Hele provides a brief overview of Darwin's works.]

… It is in biology, however, that Darwin is best known as a scientist, for his ideas on biological evolution (as we now call it) recorded in Zoonomia (1794). He had been convinced of the truth of evolution for more than twenty years and he argues confidently. He first points out the great changes produced in animals naturally, ‘as in the production of the butterfly with painted wings from the crawling caterpillar; or of the respiring frog from the subnatant tadpole’; and also ‘by artificial or accidental cultivation, as in horses, which we have exercised for the different purposes of strength or swiftness, in carrying burthens or running races’ (Zoonomia i 504). He notes that monstrosities, or mutations as we should now say, are often inherited: ‘Many of these enormities of shape are propagated, and continued as a new variety at least, if not as a new species of animal’ (i 505). These examples, and many others that he gives, show that variations can and do occur, and may be inherited.

What then are the controlling forces? If air and water are available, ‘the three great objects of desire, which have changed the forms of many animals by their exertions to gratify them, are those of lust, hunger and security’. Apropos ‘those of lust’, Darwin explains how the males of many species, such as boars, stags, cocks and quails, have developed ‘weapons to combat each other’ for the purpose of ‘exclusive possession of the females’:

The final cause of this contest amongst the males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved.

(i 507)

The spur of hunger, Darwin tells us, ‘has diversified the forms of all species of animals’. Each has adapted to its means of acquiring food—the hard noses of swine, the rough tongues of cattle, the varied beaks of birds, etc. His third criterion, the need of animals for security, ‘seems much to have diversified the forms of their bodies and colour of them’, with some animals acquiring swiftness of foot, or wings, to escape; others hard shells, protective camouflage and so on.

Such changes, of which some (as with pigeons and dogs) have come within a few hundred years, give him a confident belief in evolution:

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, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament. …

(i 509)

This rhetorical sentence goes on for several lines more, but there is no question mark at the end. Darwin correctly assigns a time scale of several hundred million years, as against the 5800 years allowed by contemporary Biblical interpreters, and the 40 million years allowed by Charles Darwin. Erasmus also stresses, later in his rhetorical sentence, that evolution proceeds ‘by its own inherent activity’, and the gradual realization that this meant ‘without divine intervention’ brought down on Darwin's head the wrath of the godly, who were numerous and powerful—and included Coleridge, who was eloquent in his denunciations of Darwin's evolutionary scheme.

Darwin's account of evolution was incomplete, and did not have enough facts to convince sceptics; but he went a long way towards defining the theory later associated with his grandson Charles, and he was generally in accord with modern thinking. He was very conscious of the struggle for existence and painted a lurid picture of its operation throughout the natural world in his last poem The Temple of Nature. He also saw beyond its apparent cruelty. First, it was a necessary part of the process for improving species. Second, it was not only the survival of the fittest but also, by and large, the survival of the happiest, because the survivors are generally healthier and happier than the victims. He saw each organic being as possessed of a quota of happiness, whence his concept of ‘organic happiness’ and the idea that evolution tends to enhance organic happiness.

After evolution, the most all-embracing of biological processes is probably photosynthesis, without which life on Earth would not have developed. Darwin made an important contribution here too. Photosynthesis may be summarized as

carbon dioxide + water + light energy r oxygen + sugar,

and although Darwin did not write this neat equation he specified all its features in Phytologia (1800), as the following quotations show:

This carbonic gas [carbon dioxide] is the principal food of plants. … Next to carbonic acid the aqueous acid, if it may be so called, or water, seems to afford the principal food of vegetables. … When vegetable leaves are exposed to the sun's light, they seem to give up oxygen gas. … The wonderful effect of vegetable digestion in producing sugar may be deduced from the great product of the sugar cane.

(Phytologia, pp. 188-93)

This goes much further than any previous description of photosynthesis.

Darwin's recognition of the essential plant nutrients is in some ways even more impressive, because the processes were not elucidated until fifty years after his death. He first fixes on ‘the azote, or nitrogen’, which ‘seems much to contribute to the food or sustenance of vegetables’, and specifies its absorption via trapping in the soil or through the formation of ammonia (‘volatile alkali’). He also points to the role of nitrates in plant nutrition. His second necessary element is carbon, an obvious choice in view of the carbon dioxide uptake. His third essential nutrient is phosphorus, and he goes on to advocate a search for calcium phosphate in Britain. Darwin was the first to suggest that nitrogen and phosphate are essential for plant growth.¹

There are many other good ideas in Phytologia. Darwin goes some way towards defining the carbon and nitrogen cycles in nature. He explains how to bore artesian wells with the best chances of success. He has ingenious suggestions for pesticides, including the biological control of aphids by the syrphid fly. His ideas for timber production by the afforestation of ‘unfertile mountains’ with ‘pines, Scotch fir’ were adopted in Britain 100 years later. He was the first to bring out clearly the individuality of buds, and he noted how such ‘linear or paternal’ generation gave no scope for variation, while ‘sexual, or amatorial, generation’ provided the variation on which evolution could work. ‘Sexual reproduction is the chef d'oeuvre, the master-piece of nature’ (p. 103).

Phytologia ends with a wider perspective on animal and vegetable nature—and some minerals too—in his philosophy of organic happiness. Strata such as limestone and coal, being the remains of animal or vegetable life, can be regarded as ‘monuments of the past felicity of organized nature’ (p. 560).

We have now reached the fourth and final facet of Darwin's genius, his way with words. The obituarist in the Monthly Magazine was no admirer—as shown by his rude remark that Darwin's stomach ‘possessed a strong power of digestion’—but even he admitted that ‘no man … had a more imperial command of words’.² The words that fell into line under Darwin's command numbered about two million, divided among seven books, all (apart from the first two) very different from each other and strongly original.

The first two books, the translations from Linnaeus, are so deadly dull that I doubt whether anyone has read them straight through. Of course they are not intended as light reading: they are reference books, being catalogues of plant characters extending to 2000 pages. They remind us of Samuel Johnson's ‘maker of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’; and there was much drudgery in Darwin's work. But it had its creative aspects too, because he took great pains to find the best possible English words for the Latin of Linnaeus, and he consulted many experts in botany and English usage, from Sir Joseph Banks to Samuel Johnson. Darwin feelingly referred to ‘the general difficulty of the undertaking, in which almost a new language was to be formed’. This is true, and was recognized at the time: the books won glowing reviews, and brought many new words into the English language. Darwin retained the habit of coining new words: there are more than 30 in The Botanic Garden. The alleged author of the translations, ‘A Botanical Society at Lichfield’, was another ‘coinage’, and Anna Seward was much amused at the bafflement of ‘scientific travellers’ who visited Lichfield in search of the Society.

To relieve the tedium of the translation, Darwin had the idea of popularizing the subject by a frivolous ‘translation’ into verse. The Loves of the Plants was the result, and he finished the first draft by 1784. He saw how it could serve as the second and lighter part of a long poem begun in the late 1770s, about his botanic garden at Lichfield. Between 1784 and 1788 The Loves of the Plants went ahead as planned and was published anonymously in April 1789. The first edition had four cantos of about 400 lines each. By then Part I of the poem had grown beyond recognition into a wide-ranging review of all science, but particularly Earth science, with notes so extensive that they formed a selective scientific encyclopaedia. Part I kept its original title, The Economy of Vegetation, which had always been clumsy and was now also misleading. It had four cantos of about 500 lines each, devoted to Fire, Earth, Water and Air respectively, with numerous footnotes and lengthy ‘Additional Notes’. Though dated 1791, Part I did not appear until about June 1792, and by then The Loves of the Plants was in its (somewhat longer) third edition. So the first edition of the complete Botanic Garden consisted of the first edition of The Economy of Vegetation and the third edition of The Loves of the Plants. These are the editions that I have used in my quotations.

In 1789 The Loves of the Plants seems to have delighted everyone, young and old, male and female. Horace Walpole, not usually easy to please, wrote that ‘the author is a great poet. … I send you the most delicious poem upon earth … all is the most lovely poetry. … The Botanic Garden, the Arabian Nights and King's Chapel are above all rules.’ Edgeworth wrote:

I have felt such continued, such increasing admiration in reading the Loves of the Plants, that I dare not express any of my Enthusiasm, lest you should suspect me of that tendency to Exaggeration, which you used to charge me with.

Anna Seward accepted the sexiness of the poem because ‘the sexual nature of plants’ has been proved, and she called it ‘a brilliant little world of Genius and its creations’.³

When The Economy of Vegetation was published in 1792, it was acclaimed as stronger and better than The Loves of the Plants. Darwin's command of cosmic imagery seemed to challenge and outdo Milton, as shown by the comments already quoted on his verses about the creation of the Universe out of Chaos. William Cowper wrote a seven-page review full of praise; the great engineer Thomas Telford called it ‘a very wonderful and masterly performance’; the Monthly Review thought it better than its predecessor, with ‘splendid’ verse; the Critical Review called it ‘truly elegant and philosophical’ and said its merits ‘occur in every page and might give occasion for undistinguishing panegyric’;⁴ and so on. For about five years Darwin became the most highly regarded poet of the day, and made a deep impression on Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as older poets like Cowper and Crabbe, as we shall see in later chapters.

Darwin's prestige was enhanced by his apparent mastery of all knowledge, and was further boosted, or so it seemed at the time, by the publication of Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life. Volume 1 (1794) consists of 582 quarto pages of general essays; Volume 2 (1796) has 772 pages on the treatment of particular diseases, which are listed under Genera, Classes and Species. It was an impressive performance, and most of the reviewers were too awe-struck to be critical. The Monthly Magazine called it ‘one of the most important productions of the age’, while the European Magazine quoted the opinion that Zoonomia ‘bids fair to do for Medicine what Sir Isaac Newton's Principia has done for Natural Philosophy’.⁵

These judgments are too kind, but there is much of interest in Volume 1, in addition to the chapter on evolution already discussed. Darwin gives a clear description of the oxygenation of blood. His treatments of mental illness and alcohol addiction, his recognition of psychosomatic effects and his zeal for microscopy—all these deserve praise.

But for Wordsworth and Coleridge it was the general essays that proved most compelling, particularly the chapters on Sleep and Dreams and on Reverie: these led to Wordsworth's idea of poetical reverie and Coleridge's concept of dramatic illusion.

The treatments of individual diseases in Volume 2 are generally unimpressive. There is far too much baring of the lancet and trying every medicine in the pharmacopoeia. The diseases are split into four classes—diseases of Irritation, Sensation, Volition and Association. Irritation ‘is excited by external bodies’; Sensation ‘is excited by pleasure or pain’; Volition ‘by desire or aversion’; and Association covers indirect effects. This may seem as clear as mud, but Darwin seems to have had no difficulties. For example, drunkenness is a disease of Irritation, being caused by an external stimulus. The most unsatisfactory category is Sensation, which includes almost everything from smallpox to sneezing. ‘Association’ has some validity in covering side-effects. ‘Volition’ is the most satisfactory of the four, corresponding roughly to what would now be called mental illness. Darwin has a wide-ranging menu of diseases of volition, including superstition, fear of hell, and credulity—a most deplorable endemic disease among ‘the bulk of mankind’, making them ‘the dupes of priests and politicians’.

After Zoonomia came the very different Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797). Though written slightly tongue-in-cheek, to avoid offending parents of potential pupils, Darwin's plan was a bold step along the road to sexual equality. That girls should be taught science and modern languages, and be given adequate physical exercise, may seem obvious now, but it was radical then. This is the shortest and most readable of Darwin's books, and it has earned a distinctive place in the history of girl's education in England.⁶

Darwin spent the next three years writing Phytologia, published in 1800 and already sufficiently sampled in my discussion of photosynthesis and plant nutrition. It earned several golden opinions, and Sir Humphry Davy included Darwin among ‘the most enlightened philosophers who have studied the physiology of vegetation’.⁷

Darwin's second long poem, The Temple of Nature, published in 1803, is in my view his finest achievement as a writer. While The Botanic Garden can be stigmatized as a rag-bag of scientific ideas tipped over a salacious catalogue of the reproductive anatomy of plants, The Temple of Nature has a coherent theme of great profundity and insight. That theme is the history of life on Earth, and Darwin presents it as an evolutionary biologist, almost as if he knew what the modern worldview would be.

Darwin's own title for the poem was The Origin of Society, and this nicely shows the affinity with his grandson's The Origin of Species and also Erasmus's wider view. He explains not only how animals originated and evolved, but also how the human animals created society. (It is not surprising that Darwin's publisher Joseph Johnson changed the title at the last moment, for he had been imprisoned in 1798 for selling an irreligious pamphlet. It is only the title-page that is changed, and ‘Origin of Society’ remains as the ‘running head’ on each right-hand page.)

The Temple of Nature is in four cantos totalling 1928 lines: the rhyming couplets are as pithy as in The Botanic Garden, though less showy. Darwin's aim ‘is simply to amuse’ by showing us the pageant of life in the order in which, as he believes, it unfolded. This pageant of nature's progress is presented by ‘the Hierophant’, who is also called Urania and the Priestess of Nature (and is really Darwin in disguise).

Canto i of The Temple of Nature is devoted to ‘Production of Life’. A few quick couplets take up through the formation of the Earth. At first there was only lifeless ocean. Then,

Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves,
Organic Life began beneath the waves. …
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth

(i 233-4, 247-8)

Darwin's ideas on the origin of life are close to the orthodox modern view that life arose spontaneously via organic molecules in the oceans or atmosphere acted on by solar ultra-violet radiation, lightning or other energy sources. Darwin needs only three couplets to summarize the subsequent course of evolution:

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.

(i 297-302)

There were ‘vast shoals’ of tiny sea creatures with shells, he says, and when they died, they formed the strata of coral, chalk and limestone. Then, ‘after islands or continents were raised above the primeval ocean, great numbers of the most simple animals would attempt to seek food at the edges or shores of the new land’ and ‘might thence gradually become amphibious’ (i 327, note). Or, turned into verse,

Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs,
And sounds aerial flow from slimy tongues.

(i 333-4)

The change from water to air is seen today, he says, in creatures having both gills and lungs, and in the birth of the human infant.

Canto ii, ‘Reproduction of Life’, goes over some of the same ground (or water) from a different viewpoint. In the beginning, Darwin believed, reproduction was asexual:

The Reproductions of the living Ens
From sires to sons, unknown to sex, commence. …
Unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells,
And coral-insects build their radiate shells. …
Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons;
Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,
The same their manners, and the same their minds.

(ii 63-4, 89-90, 107-10)

This sameness is relieved by sex, which Darwin very much approves of, because it improves the species and enhances organic happiness. He brings on an amusing pageant of all life's creatures following Love's flower-decked car: the whole procession, from the ‘love-lorn’ tigress to ‘the enamour'd Flowers’,

hail the Deities of Sexual Love.

(ii 410)

To balance the physical bias of this Canto, we have Canto iii, ‘Progress of the Mind’. Urania tells the listening nymphs that most animals have weapons or armour, but humans rely on hand, eye and brain. Forms learnt by touch in infancy are confirmed by eye:

Symbol of solid forms is colour'd light,
And the mute language of the touch is sight.

(iii 143-4)

This leads to Darwin's theory of ideal beauty from ‘the nice curves which swell the female breast’, and his philosophy of art and science based on ‘the fine power of Imitation’ …. After a long tribute to Reason, basis of ‘all human science worth the name’, Darwin compares our wisdom with the instinctive ‘wisdom’ of the wasp, bee or spider, thus linking ‘the reasoning reptile to mankind’. This teaches us to have concern for other creatures, and even more for other humans. ‘The seraph, Sympathy’, he says, ‘charms the world with universal love’, and the Temple of Nature has this motto inscribed above it:

In Life's disastrous scenes to others do,
What you would wish by others done to you.

(iii 487-8)

This precept, ‘if sincerely obeyed by all nations, would a thousand-fold multiply the present happiness of mankind’, Darwin remarks in a note.

In Canto iv of the poem, ‘Of Good and Evil’, Darwin versifies his theories of evolution and organic happiness, starting with the wide web of slaughter that indelibly marks the struggle for existence:

The wolf, escorted by his milk-drawn dam,
Unknown to mercy, tears the guiltless lamb;
The towering eagle, darting from above,
Unfeeling rends the inoffensive dove;
The lamb and dove on living nature feed,
Crop the young herb, or crush the embryon seed.

(iv 17-22)

The owl kills small creatures, which themselves prey on others; insects lay eggs in larger animals. Even the plants are at war:

Yes! smiling Flora drives her armed car
Through the thick ranks of vegetable war;
Herb, shrub, and tree, with strong emotions rise
For light and air, and battle in the skies;
Whose roots diverging with opposing toil
Contend below for moisture and for soil.

(iv 41-6)

In the oceans too ‘the grim monarch of insatiate Death’ reigns supreme. So, Darwin concludes,

Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day
One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display!
From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!

(iv 63-6)

Human ills are plentiful too—slavery, war, disease, pestilence, hunger and ‘the curst spells of Superstition’. Is there nothing but woe then? On the contrary, Darwin/Urania tells us, good and evil are nicely balanced. Humans enjoy the pleasure of consciousness, the delights of natural scenery, the warmth of sunshine, the fragrance of flowers, the taste of fruits, the charms of music painting and all the imaginative arts; and above all they may ‘drink the raptures of delirious love’. There are also the satisfactions of philanthropy, the triumphs of science and the heroism of those who fight tyrannic governments.

Finally Darwin brings on his philosophy of organic happiness. He explains the problems of overpopulation, by acorns, aphides and every other life-form, which ‘would each o'erpeople ocean, air and earth’. Similarly,

          human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended and by food sustain'd,

(iv 369-70)

would spread uncontrollably;

But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.

(iv 373-4)

For Darwin, ‘every pore of Nature teems with life’ and every speck of life adds just a little to the total of organic happiness. ‘Alchemic powers’ ensure that a new life burgeons

when a Monarch or a mushroom dies,

(iv 383)

as the ‘restless atoms pass from life to life’; and so man

Should eye with tenderness all living forms,
His brother-emmets and his sister-worms.

(iv 427-8)

The mountains of limestone, being the remains of creatures that once enjoyed life,

Are mighty Monuments of past Delight.

(iv 450)

Not everyone will applaud Darwin's triumphant conclusion:

Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives
With vanquish'd Death—and Happiness survives.

(iv 451-2)

But it is an effective finale to this evolutionary poem so far ahead of its time.

The Temple of Nature was not well received in 1803, because Darwin, by his naturalistic approach to the origin and development of life, had usurped the role reserved for God. The reviewer in the British Critic found the poem so shocking that he could not bear it: ‘We are full of horror, and will write no more’.⁸ So The Temple of Nature, although a much better poem than The Botanic Garden, had relatively little influence. …

Notes

1. See Sir John Russell, History of Agricultural Science in Great Britain (Allen and Unwin, 1966) p. 63.

2. Monthly Magazine, 13, 459, 462 (June 1802).

3. H. Walpole, Letters (1905) xiv 124, 125, 126, 141; Edgeworth, Memoirs ii 131 (with corrections from the MS, in Camb. Univ. Lib.); A. Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr Darwin, pp. 283, 376.

4. See Analytical Review, 15, 287-93 (1793); L. T. C. Rolt, Thomas Telford (Longman, 1958) p. 29; Monthly Review, 11, 182-7 (1793); Critical Review, 6, 162-71 (1792).

5. Monthly Magazine, 2, 485 (1796); European Magazine, 27, 77 (1795).

6. See, for example, D. Gardiner, English Girlhood at School (OUP, 1929) pp. 347-56; and B. Simon, Studies in the History of Education (Lawrence and Wishart, 1960) pp. 50-6.

7. H. Davy, Agricultural Chemistry (Longman, 1813) p. 9.

8. British Critic, 23, 174 (1804).

Works Cited

R. L. and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of R. L. Edgeworth, 2 vols (Hunter, 1820; Irish Univ. Pr., Shannon, Ireland, 1969).

Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr Darwin (Johnson, 1804).