Erasmus Darwin 12 December 1731 – 18 April 1802, was a scientist, poet, inventor and medical doctor. He was a member of the Lunar Society a group of important scientists and businessmen who were friends. Erasmus Darwin looked at how living things evolved change over a long time. His grandson, Charles Darwin, later wrote a book that explained evolution by natural selection.
Darwin was born in Elston, near Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire. His father was a lawyer. When Erasmus was a child, he was very interested in nature. He liked clocks and electricity. He understood nature well. He said that people should eat meat during Lent, a Christian time of fasting before Easter when people eat only simple food.
He went to the University of Cambridge, and then studied to be a doctor in Edinburgh. He became a doctor in 1756, and worked in Lichfield in Staffordshire. He worked hard and learned a lot about medicine. Soon, lots of people respected him, and the King, George III asked him to become the Royal Doctor, but Erasmus preferred to stay where he was.
Darwin married twice and had 14 children, including two illegitimate daughters by an employee and possibly, at least one further illegitimate daughter.
In 1757, he married Mary Polly Howard. They had four sons and one daughter, two of whom a son and a daughter died in infancy.
The first Mrs. Darwin died in 1770. A governess, Mary Parker, was hired to look after Robert. By late 1771, employer and employee had become intimately involved and together they had two illegitimate daughters:
Susanna and Mary Jr later established a boarding school for girls. In 1782, Mary Sr (the governess) married Joseph Day, a Birmingham merchant, and moved away.
Darwin may have fathered another child, this time with a married woman. A Lucy Swift gave birth in 1771 to a baby, also named Lucy, who was christened a daughter of her mother and William Swift, but there is reason to believe the father was really Darwin. Lucy Jr. married John Hardcastle in Derby in 1792 and their daughter Mary married Francis Boott, the physician.
Darwin met Elizabeth Pole, daughter of Charles Colyear, 2nd Earl of Portmore, and wife of Colonel Edward Pole but as she was married, Darwin could only make his feelings known for her through poetry.
When Edward Pole died, Darwin married Elizabeth and moved to her home, Radbourne Hall, four miles (6 km) west of Derby. The hall and village are these days known as Radbourne. In 1782, they moved to Full Street, Derby. They had four sons, one of whom died in infancy, and three daughters:
Darwin formed the Lichfield Botanical Society in order to translate the works of the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus from Latin into English. This took seven years. The result was two publications: A System of Vegetables between 1783 and 1785, and The Families of Plants in 1787. In these volumes, Darwin coined many of the English plant names that we use today.
Darwin then wrote The Loves of the Plants, a long poem, which was a popular rendering of Linnaeus works. Darwin also wrote Economy of Vegetation, and together the two were published as The Botanic Garden.
His last long poem, the Temple of Nature, was published after his death, in 1803. This is considered his best poetic work. It centers on his own newly-conceived theory of evolution, tracing the progression of life from microorganisms to civilized society.
Darwin's most important scientific work is Zoönomia, which contains a system of pathology, and a treatise on generation, in which he anticipated some of Lamarck's ideas on 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 invested 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!
Darwin's idea of evolution surfaced in several of his other works. In the Loves of the Plants , reprinted in several editions as The Botanic Garden, there occurs the comment: "Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection!".
All these natural history works are in the form of poems, and so they are not satisfactory from the point of view of modern science.
The last two leaves of Darwin's A plan for the conduct of female education in boarding schools contain a book list, an apology for the work, and an advert for "Miss Parkers School". The work probably resulted from his liaison with Mary Parker. The school advertised on the last page is the one he set up in Ashbourne, Derbyshire for their two illegitimate children, Susanna and Mary.
Darwin translated the work of Carolus Linnaeus from Latin to English. The books explain how plants are classified. Darwin was friends with many scientists and businessmen, in the Lunar Society.
Mary Shelley in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein notes that some unspecified "experiments of Dr. Darwin" were part of the evening discussion topics leading up to her inspiration and creation of her novel.
Contemporary literature dates the cosmological theories of the Big Bang and Big Crunch to the 19th and 20th centuries. However Erasmus Darwin had speculated on these sorts of events in The Botanic Garden.
Darwin wrote poems against slavery. He was a generous man, he helped people who had no money. He wrote poems explaining his ideas about evolution. He also made many inventions and predicted that electricity and aeroplanes would be useful in the future. He also made a sketch (simple drawing) of a hydrogen-oxygen rocket engine in 1779.
Darwin died suddenly on 18 April 1802, weeks after having moved to Breadsall Priory, just north of Derby. His body is buried in All Saints Church, Breadsall. Erasmus Darwin is commemorated on one of the Moonstones, a series of monuments in Birmingham.
Erasmus Darwin House, his home in Lichfield, is now a museum dedicated to Erasmus Darwin and his life's work. A school in nearby Chasetown recently converted to Academy status and is now known as Erasmus Darwin Academy.
