Physician, born in Elton, Nottinghamshire, C England, UK, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He studied at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, and at Lichfield became a popular physician and prominent figure, known for his freethinking opinions, poetry, large botanical garden, mechanical inventions, and position in the Lunar Society. Many of his ideas on evolution anticipated later theories. His chief prose work is Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (17946). After his second marriage (1781), he settled in Derby.
| Erasmus Darwin | |
|---|---|
| Portrait of Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby (1792) | |
| Born |
12 December 1731 Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire near Newark-on-Trent |
| Died | 18 April 1802 |
Erasmus Darwin (12 December 1731 – 18 April 1802) trained as a physician and wrote extensively on the subjects of medicine and botany. He was a member of the Darwin — Wedgwood family, most famously including his grandson, Charles Darwin.
Biography
Early life
Darwin was born at Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire near Newark-on-Trent, the youngest of four sons of Robert Darwin of Elston (1682-1754), a lawyer, and his wife Elizabeth Hill (1702-1797). His brothers were William Alvey Darwin (1726-1783), Robert Waring Darwin (1724-1816) and John Darwin, rector of Elston.
Marriages and children
Darwin married twice and had 14 children, including 2 illegitimate daughters by a mistress, and at least one further illegitimate daughter is suspected. They had four sons and one daughter, two of whom (a son and a daughter) died in infancy:
Charles Darwin (1758-1778) Erasmus Darwin II (1759-1799) Elizabeth Darwin (1763), survived 4 months. Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848), father of the naturalist Charles Darwin William Alvey Darwin (1767), survived 19 days.The first Mrs Darwin died in 1770 and a governess, Mary Parker was hired to look after Robert. By late 1771 Darwin and Miss Parker had become involved and they had two illegitimate daughters:
Susanna Parker (1772-1856) Mary Parker Jr (1774–1859)Susanna and Mary Jr later established a school.
Meanwhile, Lucy, daughter of Lucy Swift was born in 1771, and was christened a daughter of William and Lucy Swift, but she may have been Erasmus Darwin's daughter .
In 1775 Darwin met Elizabeth Pole, daughter of Charles Colyear, 2nd Earl of Portmore, and wife of Colonel Edward Pole (1718-1780), but as she was married could only make his feelings known for her through poetry. Edward Pole died in 1780 however, and so in 1781 Darwin married Elizabeth Pole and moved to her home, Radburn Hall, four miles west of Derby. They had four sons, one of whom died in infancy, and three daughters:
Edward Darwin (1782-1829) Frances Ann Violetta Darwin (1783-1874), married Samuel Tertius Galton, was the mother of Francis Galton Emma Georgina Elizabeth Darwin (1784-1818) Sir Francis
Sacheverel Darwin (1786-1859) John Darwin (1787-1818) Henry Darwin (1789-1790), died in infancy. Harriet Darwin (1790-1825), married Admiral Thomas James Malling
Death
Darwin died suddenly on the 18 April 1802, weeks after having moved to Breadsall Priory just north of Derby.
Erasmus Darwin is commemorated on one of the Moonstones;
Zoönomia
His most important scientific work is his Zoönomia (1794–1796), which contains a system of pathology, and a treatise on "generation", in which he, in the words of his famous grandson, Charles Robert Darwin, anticipated the views of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in turn is regarded to have foreshadowed the theory of evolution. The essence of his views is contained in the following passage, which he follows up with the conclusion that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life:
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, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!
Erasmus Darwin was familiar with the earlier evolutionary thinking of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo and cited him in his 1803 work Temple of Nature.
Other achievements
In addition to the Lunar Society, Erasmus Darwin belonged to the influential Derby Philosophical Society, as did his brother-in-law Samuel Fox (see family tree below).
Darwin's experiments in galvanism were an important source of inspiration for Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. However Erasmus Darwin had speculated on these sorts of events in The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts: Part 1, The Economy of Vegetation, 1791:
Roll on, ye Stars! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.
Inventions
Darwin was the inventor of several devices, though he did not patent any.
Quotations
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
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.
— The Temple of Nature 1802
For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves.
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