Erasmus Darwin (Andrew Berry)
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
Stephensonia
From John Locke, Leibniz to Samuel Butler - there is linkage.
Authored Entries
- TBA
Andrew Berry's Eramus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) is chiefly remembered for being the grandfather of Charles Darwin. In fairness, it should be Charles who is remembered for being the grandson of Erasmus.
Erasmus, a grandly overweight doctor who dabbled in just about everything, was a leading polymath - scientist, poet, inventor - in an 18th century Britain that was in the process of discovering that science and technology held the keys to progress. An emerging class -- the industrialist-entrepreneur-scientist -- was laying the foundations of Britain's future Victorian success. Several members of that class, the chemist Joseph Priestley, the proto-industrialist Josiah Wedgewood (Charles's other grandfather), James Watt and Erasmus prominent among them, banded together to form the Lunar Society, which met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon (to ensure that there was light enough for a safe late night return home). Benjamin Franklin was a corresponding member. Eschewing the traditional powerbase of London, the Lunar men made Birmingham their home, and from there planned a science-driven social revolution which would see Britain's agrarian economy transformed into an industrial one.
Educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, Erasmus began his medical career in Nottingham. The unfortunate demise of his first patient, however, had a terminal impact on that practice. Other factors too conspired to make life difficult for him: his face bore the ugly pockmarks of an early encounter with small pox, and he was an inveterate stammerer. Moves, however, to Lichfield and, later, Derby resulted in a change in his medical fortunes. While much of what passed for medicine in those days seems little more than barbaric today, Erasmus's combination of scientific acumen and common sense nudged medical practice towards its modern science-based incarnation, away from its superstitious past. It's said that the king, George III, requested a consultation but was turned down. Erasmus, never an establishment man, had little time for the monarchy. In fact, Erasmus saw his medical mission in egalitarian terms, and was at pains to treat even the very poorest, whose treatment, in the best traditions of socialism, was paid for by overcharging his wealthy patients. He traveled some 10,000 miles a year on the rutted cart tracks of the era to visit his patients and developed as a result a near professional interest in carriage design and public transport. A carriage accident which left him partially lame for the rest of his life only served to sharpen that interest. He even carefully devised ways in which he could write in his carriage -- to keep up his prodigious output of scientific and literary writing -- while on the road.
Despite his physical disadvantages, Erasmus's way with the ladies won him a prolific reproductive career. When his first wife died of apparent alcohol-exacerbated liver failure at the age of 31, she had already produced 5 children. Unwilling to slow down, Erasmus took to producing children (two daughers) with a Miss Parker whom he neglected to marry. He then became smitten with lovely raven-haired Elizabeth Collier Sacheveral-Pole who, in her late 20s, was unfortunately already taken -- married to a doddering war hero. As Jenny Uglow remarks in "The Lunar Men," "It takes some effort to see Darwin in his mid-forties -- pockmarked, overweight, limping and stuttering -- as a love-struck swain, but struck he certainly was." Erasmus duly mounted a courtship campaign in verse which was happily rewarded with the death, within a couple of years, of Colonel Sacheveral-Pole. Despite having the pick of more attractive suitors, Elizabeth married Erasmus and set about adding to the ranks of the offspring she had already produced with the Colonel. Her choice was, as a sardonic contemporary remarked, "the triumph of intellect over aesthetics." When he turned 60, Erasmus had six children under nine.
The remarkable thing about Erasmus is the amount he managed to achieve in between careering around the countryside in his carriage in pursuit of the latest patient and raising legions of offspring. In the appendix of his excellent biography of Erasmus, Desmond King-Hele lists the areas to which Erasmus made significant contributions: 1. - abolition of slavery 2. - adiabatic expansion 3. - aesthetics 4. - afforestation 5. - air travel 6. - animal camouflage 7. - artesian wells 8. - artificial insemination 9. - aurorae 10. - biological adaptation 11. - biological pest control 12. - canal lifts (locks) 13. - carriage design 14. - cemeteries 15. - centrifugation 16. - cloud formation 17. - compressed air 18. - copying machines 19. - educational reform 20. - electrical machines 21. - electrotherapy 22. - evolutionary theory 23. - exercise for children 24. - fertilizers 25. - formation of coal 26. - geological stratification 27. - hereditary disease 28. - individuality of buds 29. - insecticides 30. - language 31. - light verse 32. - limestone deposits 33. - manures 34. - materialism 35. - mental illness 36. - microscopy 37. - mimicry 38. - moon's origin 39. - nerve impulses 40. - night airglow 41. - nitrogen cycle 42. - ocular spectra 43. - organic happiness 44. - origin of life 45. - outer atmosphere 46. - phosphorous 47. - photosynthesis 48. - Portland vase 49. - rocket motors 50. - rotary pumps 51. - secular morality 52. - seed-drills 53. - sewage farms 54. - sexual reproduction 55. - speaking machines 56. - squinting 57. - steam carriages 58. - steam turbines 59. - struggle for survival 60. - submarines 61. - survival of the fittest 62. - telescopes 63. - temperance 64. - timber production 65. - travel of seeds 66. - treatment of dropsy 67. - ventilation 68. - versifying science 69. - warm and cold fronts 70. - water closets 71. - water machines 72. - wind-gauges 73. - windmills 74. - wind 75. - women's emancipation
We might these days laud the single-minded focus of the genius -- an Einstein -- but Erasmus's extraordinary intelligence transcended the narrowness of that category. He was more than a mere polymath; he was an uber-math. And one with apparently inexhaustible supplies of energy.
His speaking machine illustrates his mechanical ingenuity and his ability to bring together different aspects of his thinking into a single project. He devised his own theory of phonetics which divided language sounds into four classes -- vowels, sibilants, a mix of the two, and consonants -- and constructed a device with a wooden mouth and leather lips that, when air was blown from bellows over a quarter-inch thick silk ribbon, did a good job of enunciating words like "mama," "papa" and "map." Sadly, however, the machine failed to win the prize offered by a fellow member of the Lunar Society: £1000 (a small fortune) for "an instrument called an organ that is capable of pronouncing the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and the Ten Commandments."
Erasmus's most enduring contributions were to biology. He became interested in the work of Linnaeus in Sweden and undertook a translation of his major taxonomic treatises. He liked the simple hierarchical organization of Linnaeus's natural world and tried to apply it to his own domain, medicine. That the discovery of the role of microbes in disease was several decades away inevitably caused Erasmus problems, but his medical writings nevertheless contain glimpses of real insight. Always one to combine his interests if at all possible, Erasmus took to writing about botany in verse, with the result, rather surprisingly, that he had a bestseller on his hands. The Loves of Plants, the second part of his epic poem, The Botanic Garden, both promoted Linnaean ideas on the classification of plants and titillated its readers with discussions of the sex lives of plants. Erasmus, unlike the Victorians who capitalized on his legacy, was no prude. So far as he was concerned, an erection on waking was indicative of robust good health, and Erasmus surely delighted his readers by declaring that "sexual reproduction is the chef d'oeuvre, the masterpiece of nature."
Other naturalists were at the time questioning the biblical creation story. In France, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, (1707-88), the translator into French of Newton's "Fluxions," was busy compiling a monumental encyclopaedia of the natural world, his Histoire Naturelle, in which he more than hinted that the planet might be rather older than Genesis suggested. Erasmus, however, took these speculations further, and can legitimately be regarded as the first modern evolutionist. Not only was the Earth ancient, but he was explicit in his suggestion that humans, and other "higher" forms, had evolved from "lower" ones. In "Zoonomia", he wrote,
All animals therefore, I contend, have a similar cause of their organization, originating from a single living filament, endued indeed with different kinds of irritabilities and sensibilities, or of animal appetencies; which exist in every gland, and in every moving organ of the body, and are as essential to living organization as chemical affinities are to certain combinations of inanimate matter.
And in the Temple of Nature, published posthumously, he waxes poetic on the subject:
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.
Erasmus seems to have independently derived the same theory of evolution as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) (of whose work he was apparently ignorant) whereby species "strive" to change in response to environmental pressures. Erasmus thus had a clear idea of evolution -- change over time -- but no clear idea of how adaptive change came about. Another two generations would elapse before his grandson and Alfred Russel Wallace would solve the problem with their theory of natural selection. However, Erasmus did in fact recognize many of the fundamentals of natural selection, which is based upon the competitive struggle among individuals within a species for access to limited resources. Today we glibly summarize the idea with Tennyson's allusion to "Nature red in tooth and claw;" Erasmus put it rather better: "One great slaughterhouse the warring world."
Charles was in some ways his grandfather's biggest fan. When asked to write an introduction for Ernst Krause's 86 page essay on Erasmus, Charles cranked out 127 pages of Erasmus biography. Charles certainly recognized that his grandfather's ideas had influenced his thinking. Charles's copies of Erasmus's books survive today, complete with dense annotations made between the time of his return from the Beagle voyage and the publication, more than 20 years later, of the Origin of Species. Charles claimed to have initially "admired greatly the Zoonomia" but withdrew his praise after a re-reading it, "the proportion if speculation being so large as to the facts given." (Charles wasn't the first to make this complaint. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while admitting that Erasmus possessed "perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men," coined the term darwinizing to describe the process of wild speculation Erasmus was prone to). Charles, anyway, was interested in staking out his own claim to evolution -- to give his own grandfather too much credit would suggest that Charles was derivative at best. There's no doubting Charles's genius -- in that narrow, focused sense -- but it's probably true that his keenness to ensure that the historical record points to him and him alone has left poor Erasmus eclipsed and neglected. It's too great a coincidence that the originator of evolutionary thinking in England should happen to be the grandfather -- albeit one who died a few years before Charles was born -- of the man whose name is today welded to the idea. Perhaps the association should persist -- Darwin-Evolution -- but without specifying which Darwin.
In his later years, Erasmus's star began to dim. Alarmed by the events of the French Revolution across the Channel, England embraced a newfound conservatism that was profoundly at odds with the radical, free-thinking, atheistic materialism of Erasmus. In 1798, no lesser a person than George Canning, under secretary for foreign affairs in the Pitt government, published an anonymous parody of The Loves of Plants entitled The Loves of the Triangles. In it, Canning poured scorn on Erasmus's radical contentions, like the Earth being older than the bible suggests. Even the manuscript of Charles's biographical notes were censored with a blue pencil by Charles's daughter Henrietta: as a good Christian, she "did not wish to damage the Darwin family image by allowing her father to praise him." Erasmus died in 1802, and was buried in Breadsall church, near Derby. However, even death could not hold back Erasmus. Alterations were carried out to the church in 1877 and a grand-daughter went to check on the family graves: "My grandfather's coffin had burst open and his remains were visible and in perfect preservation. He was dressed in a purple velvet dressing gown and his features [were] unchanged."