Background
Erasmus Darwin was born on December 12, 1731 at Elston Hall in the county of Nottingham, England. He was the youngest of seven children of Robert Darwin of Elston, a lawyer and physician, and his wife Elizabeth Hill.
(Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a famous physician, resear...)
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a famous physician, researcher, inventor and natural philosopher. In poetry and essays, he popularised the science of his time. He also presented a well thought out theory of evolution in all his major works, where he got around some of the traps that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck fell into when he published his theory in 1809. Erasmus grandson, Charles Darwin, repudiated that he would have been influenced by his relative. He also played down his paternal grandfather's importance as a forerunner to the theory of evolution. Thus, for a long time, Charles Darwin affected how Erasmus was captured for posterity. He got a reputation for having produced only sketchy speculations about the origin of species, wrapped into an eccentric kind of popular science consisting of bad poetry. It was not until modern times that Erasmus Darwin was rediscovered by researchers in the history of science and ideas. He has now retrieved his place in history as one of the most original and perceptive scientific thinkers of his time. As a matter of fact, Erasmus Darwins theory of evolution was quintessential for his natural philosophy. According to him, it was not only life that had developed from a simple original condition into more and more complicated organisms, but the whole universe had, through self-organising processes, developed from a formless chaos into the cosmos we now live in. The human progress should also be seen as a part of this universal tendency towards perfection. Erasmus Darwin was most probably an important source of inspiration for Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), where the same opinion is expressed of the progress of the universe, life and civilisation. Chambers' work is also an important forerunner of darwinism that has been belittled. The universe of Erasmus Darwin is cyclical. Our world will moulder when the constructions of the heavens have reached their culmination. Everything will return into the original chaos -- and a new glorious universe will emerge like a Phoenix from the ashes, with new hopes for the future. This idea, as modern as it may sound, is obviously inspired by ancient thoughts, perhaps most notably De rerum natura by Lucretius, but updated with deism, newtonism and the optimism of the enlightenment era. Here the aged Erasmus Darwin explains the philosophy he developed during his life. The Temple of Nature (1803) describes the genesis, evolvement and end of the universe -- and the place that humanity occupies in the world. It relates to the author's previous work The Botanic Garden (1791), but can be read independently. Timaios Press is now publishing The Temple of Nature in a modern volume, where the numerous Latin quotations have been provided with translations. The Botanic Garden will be released by Timaios later this year.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9187611007/?tag=2022091-20
(Title: The Botanic Garden A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: Th...)
Title: The Botanic Garden A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation Author: Erasmus Darwin
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1547002239/?tag=2022091-20
Erasmus Darwin was born on December 12, 1731 at Elston Hall in the county of Nottingham, England. He was the youngest of seven children of Robert Darwin of Elston, a lawyer and physician, and his wife Elizabeth Hill.
He was educated at Chesterfield School, and took his medical degree at St. John's College, Cambridge. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and started practice as a physician at Nottingham.
In November 1756, Darwin settled down at Lichfield, where his reputation as a doctor was quickly established. As his methods were original and his cures unfashionably frequent, he was disliked by his fellow physicians; but as people preferred being cured in unorthodox ways to being killed in accordance with the recognized doctrines of medicine, his practice gradually became the largest in the English Midlands. He showed no interest in the proposal by George III that he should become the King's private physician. He took a pleasant house at Lichfield, where he sometimes met with Dr. Samuel Johnson, but they did not like one another because Darwin was of a highly skeptical nature while Johnson was superstitiously religious. Soon Darwin was the center of an eminent circle of philosophers and inventors, such as Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of Maria; Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton; Josiah Wedgwood, the great potter; Samuel Galton, a notable Quaker; James Watt, the famous engineer; Matthew Boulton who manufactured Watt's first steam engine; and Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen. At the instigation of Darwin, these men formed an association called the Lunar Society, so named because they met in one another's houses at the full moon, by the light of which they were enabled to return home with greater safety. All their inventions and ideas were discussed at these meetings, and Priestley declared that his philosophical work was largely due to the encouragement he received at their sessions. Among Darwin's many interests was botany. He converted a wild valley into a garden, which was visited by people from all over England, and eventually the subject inspired his best known poem "The Botanic Garden. " Although it received the praises of William Cowper and Horace Walpole, and its two parts were extremely popular on their appearance in 1789 and 1791, the work must now be described as almost the last and far from the worst example of the school of verse initiated by Alexander Pope. There is scarcely an idea or invention in the modern world that Erasmus Darwin did not originate or foresee, from evolution to eugenics, from airplanes to submarines, from antiseptics to psychoanalysis, from talking-machines to telephones. In Phytologia (1800), he wrote on agriculture and gardening; and in The Temple of Nature (1803), he again burst into verse, his subject being the origin of society. He continued to travel about the countryside as a doctor, writing his books as his carriage bumped over the primitive roads, shocking his patients with his heterodox views on religion and politics, advising them to drink less, wash regularly and breathe fresh air, curing more people than he killed, and charging nothing for attending the poor.
(Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a famous physician, resear...)
(Title: The Botanic Garden A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: Th...)
Lunar Society
He married Mary Howard. Darwin's first marriage lasted for thirteen years, and his eldest son eventually became the father of Charles Darwin, the naturalist. Ten years after the death of his first wife, he married the widow of Colonel Chandos Pole, and one of their daughters became the mother of Sir Francis Galton, the anthropologist.
