DARWIN, ERASMUS, an English physician and physiologist, was born at Elton, near Newark, on the 12th of December 1731. After studying at St. John's College, Cambridge, and taking the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh, he established himself as a physician at Lichfield, where be married, and resided till after the death of his first wife, by whom he had three sons. In the year 1781, having again married, he removed to Derby, where he died on the 18th of April 1802, In the seventieth year of his ago. lie is said to have been a man of an athletic person and of temperate habits, the advantage of which he lost no opportunity of pointing out to those over whom his influence extended. Hie biographers give him credit for having done much service to the poor of Lichfield in this respect.
Dr. Darwin claims a place in this work as a general physiologist and a poet. In the year 1781 be published his 'Botanic Garden,' a poem in two books ; in 1793 his 'Zoonemis, or Laws of Organic Life,' which was succeeded in 1796 by a continuation of the subject, the whole forming two volumes in quarto; and in 1800 his 'Phytologia, or Philosophy of Agriculture and slardeuing; iu one volume quarto of rather more than 600 pages. All these works have excited consider able atteutiou ; by some they have been extravagantly praised, by others as unreasonably depreciated, and at the present day they are little read or consulted. Nevertheless they are from deserving to sink into neglect and oblivion. The author was unquestionably a man of a highly original turn of mind ; be was unusually well read in the physics of his day ; he had a singular aptitude for seizing and illustrating natural analogies, and above all ho was fully impressed with a sense of the important truths of a universal simplicity and harmony of design throughout the whole creation. It is true that his analogies are often imaginary, his theories untenable, and his illustrations overstrained, but many of these errors were inevitable in the state of natural history in his day, and the others are by no means sufficient to overbalance his claims to fame as a clear-sighted, ingenious, and often profound physiologist. Darwin's 'Botanic Garden' is divided into two books, very unequal in size and in merit. The first, which explains the principal phenomena of vegetation, is superior in every respect to the second, which is devoted to what he calls The Loves of the Plants,' which, forming a poetical commentary upon some of the more curious phenomena of vegetable fertilisation, is filled with the most ludicrous analogies and imagery. That the
character of the 'Botanic Garden' as a poem is by no means of a high order must, we thirds, be on all hands allowed, for its language is often tawdry and tinselly, its similes extravagant, and its machinery in the highest degree fantastical as well as incomprehensible ; but on the other hand it abounds with passages which have seldom been excelled for their elegant and forcible description of natural objects in poetical language, and it can by no means be admitted that where an author's powers are expended upon an illustration of the laws of any part of the creation, they are applied to mean and insignificant subjects. It is only where he calls to his aid the fancies of the Rosicrucians that he wastes his talent and fatigues his reader. His • Phytologia' is remarkable for the number of novel and ingenious ideas which it contains : many of these were too far in advance of those of his contemporaries to be much esteemed when they appeared, bat they are singularly in accordance with opinions which now are either altogether recognised, or are under discussion, with a strong probability of being finally adopted. For instance, be particularly insisted upon the close analogy between plants and animals in their functions, showing that the difference between the two kingdoms is the necessary consequence of the difference between their wants, necessities, and habits of life. He urged with great force that every bud of a plant is the seat of a separate and in some measure inde pendent system, that plants are therefore in one sense congeries of individuals living in concert but growing independently; finally, he pointed out the analogy between buds and seeds, showing that the woody part of plants is really analogous to the roots of seeds, and produced by the adhesion of the descending matter of organisation which passes downwards from the buds. While however we thus give Darwin credit for a rank in science that has hardly been accorded to him before, wo are bound to add that his errors were neither few nor unimportant. Ile was too fond of tracing analogies between dissimilar objects; he readily adopted the ingenious views of others without sufficient inquiry ; he had the great fault of being often a credulous collector and a fanciful reasoner, and finally his prose writings are often inexcusably inelegant, ill-arranged awl ungrammatical.