Charles Darwin; his life and work / by Charles Frederick Holder.

  • Charles Frederick Holder
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Charles Darwin; his life and work / by Charles Frederick Holder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    236/370 (page 160)
    Zoonomia (1794-6) and Botanic Garden, while others were The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society, a Poem, with Philosophical Notes, and The Shrine of Nature, a posthumous publication ; The Loves of the Plants, the second part of The Botanic Garden, was published anonymously in 1789, the entire poem appearing in 1791. This pro- duction showed more scientific than poetic genius, being especially remarkable for the grandiloquent phraseology and high-sounding words and sentences employed. It was caricatured by Canning in his Loves of the Triangles. The poem to-day is well deserving a place among the curiosities of literature, and while its decasyllabic rhymed couplets may not be admired, they evidently emanated from no ordi- nary mind. An interesting feature in his life is the fact that, to quote his grandson, he undoubtedly anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinions of Lamarck, the fundamental principle of the theory of evolution being traced in his writings. Thus he says that one and the same kind of living filaments 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,