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[Annotation by Darwin:] Scotsman

Dr Erasmus Darwin, the author of "The Botanic Garden," was a celebrated, in Great Britain at least, in the last century as his grandson in the present epoch; but his fame was based on very different grounds. He was one of the most eminent physicians of his time, and he was esteemed by contemporaries who had some authority in matters of literary opinion one of the greatest poets his country has produced, His professional reputation was necessarily temporary, inasmuch as he made no important contribution to medical science; and his poetical fame has with almost marvellous, and probably unjust, rapidity been utterly obscured. The basis on which his right to a permanent place in men's memories now rests is the fact that he foreshadowed, and to some extent even anticipated, the evolution theory which his grandson has done more than any other man to establish and confirm. But that Dr Darwin was a man of remarkable force of character and of intellect is made abundantly clear in the very interesting "Preliminary Notice" which fills the larger half of this volume (3), and which is from the pen of Mr Charles Darwin. His mind was incessantly active, and he was an indefatigable explorer in the whole domain of physical science, so far as it was then open to exploration. Twenty years, at least, before the first steamship was constructed, forty before the first locomotive was in existence, he anticipated the future achievements of steam in the well-known lines beginning:─

Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam, afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car.

And he showed equal prescience with reference to several other matters that came within the scope of his researches and speculations. Mr. Charles Darwin's peculiarly modest and retiring nature gives special value and interest to the details respecting his family, which he includes in this "Preliminary Notice." Dr Ernst Krause's essay, of which a translation by Mr. W. S. Dallas occupies the remainder of the volume, is a careful study of Erasmus Darwin's character and works, with a view of establishing the accuracy of the proposition with which Dr Krause sets out, that─

"What is perhaps the most important of his many-sided endowments─namely his broad view of the philosophy of nature─ was not intelligible to his contemporaries; it is only now, after the lapse of a hundred years, that by the labours of one of his descendants we are in a position to estimate at its true value the wonderful perceptivity, amounting almost to divination, that he displayed in the domain of biology…. Almost every single work of the younger Darwin may be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his ancestor; the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the protective arrangements of animals and plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses; nay, even the studies on infants are to be found already discussed in the writings of the elder Darwin. [Erasmus Darwin, pp. 132-3]