DARWIN, ERASMUS (1731-1802), English man of science and poet, was born at Elton, Nottinghamshire. Educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, he settled in 1756 as a physician at Nottingham, but moved in '757 to Lichfield, and in 1781 to Derby, where he died suddenly on April 18, 1802. His fame as a poet rests upon his Botanic Garden, though he also wrote The Temple of Nature, or the Origin of Society (1803) , and The Shrine of Nature (posthumously published). The Botanic Garden (1792, the part entitled The Loves of the Plants was published anony mously in 1789) shows a genuine scientific enthusiasm and interest in nature, but has little other poetic quality. The artificial char acter of the diction renders it in emotional passages stilted, and the personification is carried to excess. Botanical notes are added to the poem, and its eulogies of scientific men are frequent. Darwin's most important scientific work is his Zoonomia 96), which contains a system of pathology, and a treatise on generation, in which he, in the words of his famous grandson, Charles Darwin, "anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinions of Lamarck." The essence of his views is contained in the hypothesis that through millions of ages all warm-blooded animals may have arisen from one living filament which the First Cause endowed with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations.
His Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Garden ing (1799) claims that plants have sensation and volition. A paper on Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797) completes the list of his works.