DARWIN, EaAsmus (1731-1802). An Eng lish physician and naturalist, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He was born at Elton. Ile was a keen and philosophic observer of nature. and embodied much of his obaervations and thoughts in didactic verse, which form several long poems, whose style is stilted and fancifully elaborate. The principal of these is The Botanic Garden (17891, of which the second part, en titled "The Loves of the Plants," became fa mous. and was translated into French and Italian. it contained ninny suggestions as to `protective mimicry' and other features after wards a part of the elaborated doctrine of the evolution of plants. In 1794-96 was published his Zoonomia, in prose, which was primarily a medical work, but contained many more gen eral reflections, and received wide notice. Its ideas were so novel and revolutionary that, ac cording to Samuel Butler, Paley's Natural The ology was aimed at it and extinguished for a time its influence. Charles Darwin wrote of it, in his Origin of Species: "It is curious how largely my grandfather anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck;" and modern students see also that he anticipated much that Charles Darwin himself advanced to acceptance. Erasmus Darwin's views on evoln tion include the belief that all animals have originated from a single living 'filament'; that changes are produced by differences of climate; that all animals undergo constant changes, and that many of their acquirements are transmitted to their posterity; that the contests of the males for the possession of the females lead to such results as were afterwards stated under the name of 'sexual selection'; that many struc tures have been acquired as a means of security in a struggle for existence; and that a vast length of time has elapsed since these modifiea tions began. The debt. which Charles Darwin,
Lamarck, and other exponents of the doctrines of organic evolution, owe to Erasmus Darwin has been carefully considered by Packard in his biography of Lamarck (New York. 1901), and by Krause in The Scientific Works of Erasmus Darwin (1879) ; also by Butler. Erolu-tion, Old and New (London, 1879). A meagre biography by Anna Seward was published in London in 1804. Dr. Darwin's last work Was Phy/oiogiO, Or the Philosophy of .1yriculturc and Gardening (1799), in which he expresses a belief that plants have sensation and volition. Ile died at Derby. See EVOLUTION.