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A German disciple of Darwinism having written a treatise to point out how that the germs of that philosophy had existed in the mind of the grandfather of its celebrated exponent, who had even anticipated some of his descendant's theories, Mr. Darwin himself has prefixed to an English translation of the book a "Preliminary Notice of Erasmus Darwin" (John Murray). This forms more than one half of the volume, and will be read perhaps by a great many whom the original work of Dr. Krause would have failed to reach. The once famous author of the Botanic Garden, who conceived the supremely absurd, but what was once thought to be a most ingenious and sublime idea, of turning the processes of the generation of plants into verse, was in his time almost as remarkable a man as Charles Darwin is in ours. His "sweet tetrandrian, monogynian strains," however, could not survive such a caricature as Canning gave of them in the famous "Loves of the Triangles," and since then his name is remembered chiefly by a  couplet, presaging certainly with remarkable provision the triumph of steam:─

"Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar,

Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car."

Dr. Erasmus Darwin, by the testimony of his more illustrious grandson, was no doubt a man of considerable originality and power of mind, who was before his time in many things, and who even conceived something like an idea of the theory of evolution. His German editor, Dr. Krause, however, has carried the parallel too far.