We shouldn’t let the day pass without a thought for Erasmus Darwin, whose birthday it is today.
Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby 1792 (WikiCommons)
Erasmus was born on 12th December 1731, at Elston Hall in Nottinghamshire.
During his seventy year span, Charles’s illustrious grandfather made more and varied contributions to the world of ideas than many today would guess – if they’ve even heard of him.
Erasmus is also of course the spirit behind Zoonomian; here are a couple of earlier posts that sum up his achievements and involvements:
Erasmus Darwin House in Litchfield (Photo:Tim Jones)
Erasmus set up his medical practice in Litchfield, where he lived from 1756 to 1781. His house, now the Erasmus Darwin House Museum, is close to the magnificent cathedral, and well worth a visit. (Samuel Johnson also lived in Litchfield, so you can visit his house while you’re there.)
Litchfield Cathedral (Photo: Tim Jones)
Erasmus spent the last two years of his life at Breadsall Priory, where he died on April 18th 1802, aged 70.
Breadsall Priory, where Erasmus Darwin died in 1802 (Photo permission S.Klinge)
To round off, here are three excellent and recent videos on Erasmus courtesy of History West Midlands:
Erasmus Darwin at The Heart of The Litchfield Enlightenment
Grandson Charles and Grandfather Erasmus Darwin had at least one thing in common besides their illustrious name: they both took delight in figuring out how the world works – which isn’t to say they always followed the same interests.
Charles, we know, focused on the natural world – often in great, great, detail. Erasmus, less fixated but still very much the naturalist, engaged also with just about every aspect of science, technology and the trials and tribulations of the human condition you can imagine.
As happy in the botanical garden as the coachmaker’s yard or canal digger’s trench – it was all the same to him, many are the fields where Erasmus Darwin’s substantive contributions, too often unsung, resonate to the present day.
And while Charles was doubtless adventurous in mind and deed – he did afterall make the voyage of the Beagle – Erasmus, in the broader sense I would argue, ‘got out more’.
No surprise then, one evening in 1756, to find a 24 years young Erasmus Darwin at the epicentre of London society and entertainment: the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Less surprising still to find him back at his Nottingham lodgings pre-occupied with reverse-engineering the Gardens’ then prize crowd-pulling spectacle: the artificial waterfall, or Cascade – more of which later.
Vauxhall Gardens in 1751 (five yrs before Erasmus’s visit) Samuel Wale (Wikicommons)
The twelve acre Vauxhall Gardens operated from 1661 to 1859, and enjoyed a fantastically diverse clientele. Anyone who was anyone – or aspired to be – had to show their face: from Kings and Queens to honest tradesmen, to a dependable spattering of pick-pockets and prostitutes.
Entertainments at Vauxhall (Photo:Tim Jones. Exhibit at Museum of London)
All mixed shoulder to shoulder, intent on enjoying music, dancing, or one of the many laid-on spectacles: illuminations, fireworks, circus acts, mechanical wonders, balloon rides, battle recreations and panoramas celebrating the fetes of great explorers. Top of the list for many would be a romantic diversion with a favoured beau or belle under the tree-covered walkways.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering what prompted this post – digging around in a pleasure garden – it’s down to my latest reading: a new History of Vauxhall Gardens, by David Coke and Alan Borg1: a beautifully presented, comprehensive, and accessible read. Check out the book’s website here and write-ups in the Guardian here and here
I’ve suffered from amateur social historian syndrome since arriving in London eleven years ago – it’s hard to avoid when the place drips with the stuff; but the Vauxhall interest is closer to home – literally; my old flat on the Vauxhall Bridge Road overlooked the former Gardens’ site. Now home to a plain-vanilla grassed park, the only reminder of former glories is the yearly bonfire night sputter of fireworks launched by good-natured, if boisterous, locals. (On which theme, check out this earlier post).
Echo of past glories. View from my flat in 2003: fireworks rising from the former site of Vauxhall Gardens (Photo: Tim Jones)
Reading the new history though, I was intrigued by how few famous scientists (natural philosophers in their day) or technical folk are associated with the Gardens, either as self-reporting visitors or through third-party narratives .
Maybe the great and the good of the scientific establishment eschewed egalitarian Vauxhall in favour of the more exclusive (and expensive) Ranelagh Gardens across the river in Chelsea? At least there was a stone bust of Isaac Newton on permanent display at Vauxhall.
Anyhow, it’s entirely possible a trawl through the personal letters of individuals, where they’re catalogued, would turn up further references.
For my part, I checked out Erasmus’s letters – and he didn’t disappoint.
Coming back to the artificial waterfall or cascade for a moment. Installed in 1752, Coke & Borg say of it:
To add to its theatricality, the Cascade was concealed behind a curtain which was drawn back at a particular time in the evening, as night fell, to reveal a three-dimensional illuminated scene of a landscape with a precipitous waterfall; the illusion was created with sheets of tin fixed to moving belts, turned by a team of Tyer’s [the owner] lamplighters; when it was running, the noise and spectacle must have been terrific 1.
Then I found this letter from Erasmus, dated 9th Septemebr 1756, describing his interpretation of the operation of the spectacle to his friend Albert Reimarus, drawing and all:
Erasmus’s drawing of the artifiicial waterfall or cascade at Vauxhall Gardens (Picture credit: The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, Cambridge University Press, 2007, Letter 56-6)
“The artificial Water-fall at Vaux Hall I apprehend is done by pieces of Tin, loosely fix’d on the Circumferences of two Wheels. It was the Motion not being perform’d at Bottom in a parabolic Curve that first made me discover it’s not being natural. The Velocity at Top is not so great to my rememberance as at the Bottom half of the fall, as I suspect the top Wheel is less than the lower one; a Shade is put where the Wheels join. At Bottom are many less Wheels I conjecture. Now the Velocity of the fall from a to b not being encreased was another thing that shock’d my Eye. What you mean when you say “let the Water fall over a Parabola etc”, I don’t understand.“
Photo:Tim Jones. Exhibit at Museum of London.
I’m taking expressions like “The Velocity at Top is not so great to my remembrance….” as evidence Erasmus actually visited the Gardens himself in the summer of 1756, possibly accompanied by Reimarus.
For Erasmus, the waterfall ‘game’ was given away by the shape of the flow – something other than parabolic, and not moving at the expected relative speeds.
In fairness to the designer (the concept likely derived from Francis Hayman’s theatrical stagecraft), that exposing the spectacle as anything other than natural required such analysis seems high praise indeed! Incidentally, Coke & Borg maintain no visual representation of the cascade exists, so this might be as close as we get.
(As an aside, there’s also evidence Erasmus’s sister Susannah (Sukey) visited the Gardens. In a letter of 12th June 1759 to his wife Mary (Polly), Erasmus accuses his sister of exagerating the number of people attending, 30,000, saying that number would not fit3 (although audiences of 12,000 are known to have gathered). There’s also a much later association with Charles Darwin, that appears in the correspondence4; not that he visited the Gardens but, as a twelve year old boy, having watched one of Vauxhall’s favourite performers, a ventriloquist named Mr Alexandre, did imitations of animal calls – interesting eh?)
We should take care when talking about Erasmus in this period not to visualise him along the lines of the podgy, red-cheeked albeit aimiable 38 year old captured by Joseph Wright and hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1756, Erasmus was 24 years old, single (he married Mary/Polly Howard the following year), and largely unknown; he’d only two months earlier unpacked his bags in Nottingham to start his first medical practice.
So this is before he moved to Lichfield, and way before the invitation to become the King’s physician, his rivalry with Samuel Johnson (of dictionary fame and a regular at Vauxhall Gardens to the degree he appears in contemporary prints), or his adulation as England’s best loved poet. Moreover, the brief spell Erasmus spent in Nottingham is sparsley covered in the literature, with no mention in the standard biographies of trips to London or the Gardens. There’s just the one letter as far as I can tell.
In conclusion, it’s nice to see Erasmus’s early credentials as both engineer and bon viveur reinforced in the one story (however much, as a fan, that assessment might be tainted by confirmation bias :-)).
In their longevity, Vauxhall Gardens represent a unique microcosm, a laboratory for the study of change in societal norms, fashion, culture, politics and contemporary opinion. Coke’s and Borg’s analysis refreshes our insight on these, and placing Erasmus Darwin at the scene adds to our understanding of his early life.
Update 4/9/11
Twitter friends have suggested Samuel Pepys as an example of a ‘scientist’ known to have visited Vauxhall. He for sure counts as one of the establishment great and the good, and was a president of the Royal Society to boot. Coke and Borg do talk about Pepys, who wrote at some length about Vauxhall Gardens in his famous diaries. I’m afraid I associate Pepys so strongly with the Gardens, and for all his other interests and achievements – not just in science, that I completely forgot to mention him – poor chap. Still, he’s one guy, and it would be interesting to see if any of the other famous scientific names of the day including Newton, Wren, or, as Rebekah Higgitt (@beckyfh) suggested via twitter, Edmund Halley or Joseph Banks made mention of Vauxhall experiences in their letters. I must say, if I had my bust up there in all its glory like Newton did, I’d be checking up on it every friday night.
You’re a young 33, with an already impressive scientific career under your belt, and – although you only suspect it – a spectacular future ahead of you. Within 10 years, you’ll be elected President of the Royal Society.
But in November 1811, you’ve got something else on your mind.
How exactly would Humphry Davy (he of Davy Lamp fame among many other achievements) impress the first true love of his life – the beautiful widow and heiress Jane Apreece ?
Well, as it turned out……with more science of course. And unlikely as it might seem, with quotes from the book whose spine forms the header of this very blog: Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. (Erasmus was Charles Darwin’s grandfather….how many times)
Over to you, Humph….
‘There is a law of sensation which may be called the law of continuity & contrast of which you may read in Darwin’s Zoonomia [sic]. An example is – look long on a spot of pink, & close your eyes, the impression will continue for some time & will then be succeeded by a green light. For some days after I quitted you I had the pink light in my eyes & the rosy feelings in my heart, but now the green hue & feelings – not of jealousy – but of regret are come.’
Smooth, or what?
I’m not the first to spot Davy’s creative application of ground-breaking ideas in colour perception; the above passage is from Richard Holmes’s award-winning Age of Wonder. But what’s it all about? Let’s start with Zoonomia.
Erasmus describes his experiments on colour and the eye in Volume I, Section III: Motions of the Retina; and Section XI: Ocular Spectra.
In his letter to Jane Apreece, Davy is referring to this experiment (Warning for the unfamiliar: f = s):
Zoonomia Vol1 Section III, p.20
Later, Erasmus restates the experiment and proposes a mechanism for the observed effect:
Zoonomia Vol1 Section III
Red Spot (Zoonomia V1 S.III p.14)
Darwin’s experiments covered a range of colour and contrast effects. Here in his ‘tadpole’ experiment he interprets the bright after-image we see after staring at a dark object, explained again in terms of conditioning and sensitivity of the retina.
Erasmus’s ‘tadpole’ (a little smudged after 200 years)
The drawings in Zoonomia are individually hand drawn and hand coloured. In this passage, Erasmus encourages his readers to partake of some drawing-room diversion using silks of many colours:
Erasmus encourages his readers to lay down silks
Readers are encourgaged to lay down coloured silks
All exciting stuff, not least for Erasmus, who betrays his giddiness in this chuckling wind up to his analysis, where he curries favour with the incumbent president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks.
“I was surprised, and agreeably amused, with the following experiment. I covered a paper about four inches square with yellow, and with a pen filled with a blue colour wrote upon the middle of it the word BANKS in capitals, and sitting with my back to the sun, fixed my eyes for a minute exactly on the centre of the letter N in the middle of the word;after closing my eyes, and shading them somewhat with my hand, the word was dinstinctly seen in the spectrum in yellow letters on a blue field; and then, on opening my eyes on a yellowish wall at twenty feet distance, the magnified name of BANKS appeared written on the wall in golden characters.” [Banks was elected President of the Royal Society in 1778].
Erasmus saw Banks’s name in large golden letters on his garden wall
Did Erasmus get it right with all that stuff about flexing of the antagonist fibres and analogy to the muscles? Well, he wasn’t a million miles away from the truth. Indeed, it looks like yet another case of Erasmus Darwin not getting the credit he deserves for being ahead of the game.
Here’s a modern popular version of the tadpole ‘trick’ (Credit: from here)
The idea is you stare at the bulb for 20 or 30 seconds then look at the white space to the right of it. The popular description of the effect is in terms of the retina cells stimulated by the light portions of the image being desensitized more than those which respond to the dark part of the image – so that the least depleted cells react more strongly when the eye switches to the more uniform all-white image next to the bulb.
Davy Lamp (Wiki Commons)
The modern authors note also that the size of the afterimage varies directly with the distance of the surface on which it is viewed: a manifestation of Emmert’s Law. This is consistent with Erasmus’s report of the name BANKS writ large on his garden wall.
Likewise, the modern interpretation of colour afterimages is popularly framed in terms of how ‘fatigued’ cells respond to light (See how fatigued’ aligns with Erasmus’s muscular references). Erasmus didn’t know we have two types of light-sensitive cells in the eye: cones (that broadly speaking detect colour) and rods (that are more sensitive to absolute brightness), and that the cones themselves are sub-divided to be maximally sensitive to red , blue and green (RGB).
But he did understand the concept of complementary colours, and recognised that whatever part of the retina detects the colour red becomes fatigued through over-exposure; he’d got the principle that green appears againt white as a kind of negative red ).
If we dig a little deeper we find the brain-proper conspires with the retina to consider what we see in terms of black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow opponencies. And the corresponding three sets of retinal cells operate in a pretty arithmetical fashion: the electrical impulse sent to the brain by the red-green cells is proportional to the net red-green exposure to light that the cell has experienced in recent time; likewise the blue-yellow sensitive cells.
That’s all clear then.
What bugs me a wee bit is that in my research for this post I never once saw a reference to Erasmus Darwin. Rather, the standard historical reference seems to be the German psychologist Ewald Hering (1834-1919), who is credited with the first observations of the phenomenon.
Hold the horses – it’s Valentines Day
Ok, we got a bit lost in the science there. And I got a bit hot under the collar; eh-hem. So, the real question is: did Davy’s colourful overtures hit the mark? Well, sort of. Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece married the following year in 1812. The bad news is it didn’t really work out longterm.
All the same, Davy shone ever bright in his science. Already famous for discovering a whole range of new chemical elements, including via separation by electrolysis potassium and sodium, and chlorine gas; he went on to discover elemental iodine and, for good measure, invented the Davy Lamp – thereby saving who knows how many thousands of lives in the mining indistry. In 1820, when Banks’s death ended his 40+ year run at the head of the Royal Society, Davy was elected President.
All of which doubtless kept a bit of colour in his cheeks.
Shop-front in Penzance where Davy served his early apprenticeship (Tks S.Klinge)
Sources
Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia Vol 1 Pub. J.Johnson 1796 (photos are from author’s copy)
Holmes, Richard. Age of Wonder. Pub. Harper Press (the softback is out for about £7 now – buy it!)
then show everyone how ahead of the evolutionary curve you are with this ‘Other Darwin Genius’ tee-shirt, exclusive to Zoonomian at CommunicateScience. 100% American made and shipped to you direct from RedBubble. Just click the ‘View & Buy’ link below.
Yesterday evening at the Royal Institution, I watched the respected biographer and academic Richard Holmes make an empassioned plea for an end to the ‘two cultures’ rift between science and the arts – a reference to the term coined by CP Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959.
Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night. (Photo Sven Klinge)
In a packed auditorium, familiar as the venue for the annual Christmas Lectures, Holmes challenged his hosts to do their bit by including humanities speakers as a fixture in the RI lecture programme. He certainly held the historical high ground, sharing a daiz occupied in another age by Sir Humphrey Davey, Michael Faraday and significantly the poet Samuel Coleridge.
Faraday at the Royal Institution
Dipping into his new book The Age of Wonder, Holmes used the lives and achievements of explorers like Sir Joseph Banks and the romantic polymath Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles) to illustrate an age when science and art moved together to their mutual benefit. He continued through the lives of the Herschels: from William and Catherine and the discovery of Uranus, to Catherine’s formative influence on the young John Herschel. Then on to Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday, finishing with Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century. Readers who enjoyed hearing about Joseph Banks’s culturally sensitive integration activities in this earlier post on the Otaheite Dog, will find more revelations in the same vein in Age of Wonder.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Holmes bemoaned the lack of general access to source texts, including Banks’s Endeavour Journal and Darwin’s Botanic Garden – another sign of the literary/science imbalance of two cultures thinking. Both of these works are wonderful pieces of literature as well as scientific documents. The Botanic garden is a compendium of virtually all 18th century science expressed as poetry, in a format where the footnotes are as inspiring as the main text. The good news is that both are available online.
Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Age of Wonder
Holmes believes that if there there was one event more than any other that influenced Snow’s proclamation on the two cultures, it was the horrific association of science with the atomic bomb. An audience member blamed the divide in the UK on the arts/science choices students were forced to make at A-Level. Whatever the reason, Holmes’s comments are a timely introduction to a week in which the two cultures theme figures large, with as part of the London Consortium’s Art and Science Now Programme, a mix of all-day conference sessions and receptions scheduled at the Wellcome Institute on Thursday, the Science Museums’s Dana Centre on Friday, and the Tate Modern Art Gallery on Saturday. More on those later.
UPDATE: My report on the Art and Science Now ‘Two Cultures’ event is HERE
It was sad to hear the news today that Waterford Wedgwood, the company formed from an amalgamation of Waterford glass and Wedgwood pottery, has fallen into administration.
The name Wedgwood, and its most characteristic and recognised Jasper Ware products, are well known icons of the British pottery industry. Perhaps less well known are the links between the founder of Wedgwood pottery, Josiah Wedgwood, and the Darwin family – including Erasmus Darwin, the inspiration for this blog.
Wedgwood's Portland Vase
As discussed in this earlier post, Erasmus and Josiah were close friends and core ‘Lunar Men’. The two exchanged ideas and letters on a range of topics from canals to pyrometers, Erasmus bringing his chemistry knowledge to bear in developing new colours for pottery. He later designed a windmill for grinding pigments at Wedgwood’s factory at ‘Etruria’.
Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah gave Erasmus music lessons and, by the by, came to marry his son Robert, establishing a trend maintained by Charles Darwin when he married his first cousin Emma, the daughter of Josiah (II).
Portland Vase at the Huntington Gallery, San Marino CA
Wedgwood’s most famous pottery design is the ‘Portland Vase’, a reproduction in Jasper Ware of a piece of (probably) Roman cameo-glassware. In 2003, something of a controversy blew up regarding the true age of the vase, one which, as this Guardian article explains, science was not able to unravel.
Portland Vases are still being made at Wedgwood but, priced at £4893, are evidently not moving in sufficient quantity to save the business. When Erasmus received one of the first of these technically challenging pieces, he characteristically proceeded to analyse and document the various Roman scenes; he dedicates 7 pages of text and 4 fold-out drawings to it in his Botanic Garden of 1791.
Update 5 Feb 2012 Wedgewood Museum to close (In the Guardian) LinkHERE
You’ll hardly need reminding that next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of his best known work – On The Origin of Species. It’s already a big deal: special events, new book editions, talks, tee-shirts, diaries, calendars, and commemorative mugs – the lot. And rightly so – however we might nuance the term, there would be no Darwinism without Darwin. But as the celebrations bubble up to a crescendo of reverence on February 12th, I wonder if the world will spare a thought for Darwin’s own origins, and particularly his illustrious grandfather – Erasmus (1731-1802). He’ll certainly be struggling for attention, so consider this a pre-emptive strike on behalf of The Other Darwin Genius.
Charles (1809-1882)
We automatically associate ‘Darwin’ with the name ‘Charles’. A mention of Erasmus in conversation brings blank looks, even from devotees of the definitive Charles. Genius twice in the same family – impossible! And if the old fellow had some notoriety in his day, surely it must pale beside that of his grandson.Yet Erasmus is not to be compared to Charles in any competitive sense. Their skills, inclinations, personality, temperament, and achievements were very different. It was their shared inquisitiveness and intellectual energy that destined each to leave a lasting imprint on the world. We all know about Charles’s lasting imprint, but few are aware that Erasmus was:
Erasmus (1809-1882)
The greatest physician of his time
An original and popular poet
A respected scientist and inventor
A key player and catalyst in the industrial revolution
His life has been richly documented by physicist Desmond King-Hele, whose analysis reveals a breathtaking range of interests, involvements and achievements. Not associated with one single big theory or event, Erasmus confuses our conception of the traditional achiever. Charles by contrast is easy – well and truly Mr Evolution. So what makes Erasmus so appealing?
His lifelong profession was medicine. Widely recognised in England as the top doctor of his day, he famously declined to be King George III’s personal physician. (Had he accepted of course, George’s porphyria would have quickly cleared up, the King’s eye would have stayed on the political ball, and America would still be ours – yippee! Well, O.K. – maybe not; Erasmus’s sympathies actually tended towards the pro-revolutionary.) He chose rather to spread his benefaction widely, making house calls to ordinary folk in all weathers and treating the poor for free.
Erasmus’s medical knowledge is captured in the 1796 ZOONOMIA. At 5kg, the big and heavy first edition makes fascinating reading. Some of the 18th century cures sound worse than the diseases, but while Erasmus’s use of the blood-letting lancet for physical conditions may have been typical, his approach to mental disease was ahead of its time. Lunatics in his care could expect compassion instead of the more familiar beating.
Zoonomia Vol II was a catalogue of disease (Tim Jones private collection)
Charles inherited his knack for ruffling religious feathers from his grandfather, who in Zoonomia classified religion as a mental disease – a ‘Desease of Volition’. Here he dismisses it along with other fantasies in a discussion on Credulitas, or Credulity. To get a flavour of the language and its appearance, the reader is invited to struggle through this photocopy of the original text:
[text continues]………
In regard to religious matters, there is an intellectual cowardice instilled in the minds of the people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensible virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and in the catholic church is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes…
For each desease, Darwin offers a cure. Headed ‘M.M.’ for Materia Medica, his wise council on credulity reads:
M.M. The method of cure is to increase our knowledge of the laws of nature, and our habit of comparing whatever ideas are presented to us with those known laws, and thus to counteract the fallacies or our senses, to emancipate ourselves from the false impressions which we have imbibed in our infancy, and to set the faculty of reason above that of imagination.
Rational thinking and appeal to scientific method shine through – not surprising given the very interesting people Erasmus was mixing with: James Watt and Matthew Boulton of steam engine fame, Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame, the Scottish chemist James Kier, and the politically animated chemist and co-discoverer of oxygen Joseph Priestley.
Statue of Boulton, Watt, and Murdoch in Birmingham, UK (Photo: Tim Jones)
With Erasmus’s support, Wedgwood got England’s first canal built, while his friendship and technical exchanges with Watt and Boulton catalysed the steam age. Together known as the Lunar Men, (so called because they travelled to monthly meetings assisted by moonlight) this group drove the industrial revolution and gave us the roots of our technological world.
A pioneering scientist and engineer in his own right, Erasmus is unsung in many fields. He discovered ‘Charles Gas Law’ before Charles -who claimed it 24 years later, glimpsed partial pressures ahead of Dalton, and explained how clouds form. His musings appear almost casually in a letter to Boulton, where we first learn that his plans for weather forecasting will be enhanced by the accuracy of John Harrison’s new clock – that is Harrison of longitude fame (this single letter is astonishing in the icons it embraces), then:
Erasmus explained cloud formation
I am extremely impatient for this Play-Thing! [Harrison’s clock] as I intend to fortell every Shower by it, and make great medical discovery as far as relates to the specific Gravity of Air: and from the Quantity of Vapor. Thus the Specific Gravity of the Air, should be as the Absolute Gravity (shew’d by the Barometer) and as the Heat (shew’d by Boulton’s Thermometer). Now if it is not always found as these two (that is as one and inversely as the other) then the deviations at different Times must be as the Quantity of dissolved Vapour in the Air.
Elsewhere in the same letter, having playfully struck Boulton off as a “plodding man of Business” he proceeds to bribe him with wine on the condition he glass-blows one of the empties into a specific form required for his (Darwin’s) researches.
The first reference to the mechanism for cloud formation comes in a 1784 letter to Josiah Wedgwood; with what amounts to a description of the universal law of adiabatic expansion of gases, which he later published in a formal journal.
Evolution is also discussed in Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature, also by by Erasmus. His coat of arms comprised three scallop shells with the telling motto E conchis omnia – ‘everything from shells’, reflecting his belief that all life started from sea creatures. Unfortunately, the device was not subtle enough to evade the local clergy, leaving Erasmus force-put to paint it out and thereby keep the peace (it remained on his bookplate). Erasmus’s gift for marrying art with science matured in his narrative poem The Botanic Garden, which brought him literary fame and the respect of influential friends like the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of whom record him as an important influence on their work.
Erasmus was clever but not boring. A true man of the Enlightenment, he took all his pleasures seriously. Shunning alcohol, he preferred to act on his conviction that sugar and cream were the healthiest of foods, consuming both in quantity. He had a semi-circular profile carved in his dining table to accommodate the girth of his indulgence. Always amorously inclined, his successful bid for the hand of the young socialite Elizabeth Pole, whilst in the disrepair of his fifties, is intriguing – not to say impressive, as are his liberal reproductive powers, evidenced by 14 children including two illegitimacies.
And so it goes on: from speaking machines to steam turbines, from educational reform to carriage design, from the moon’s origin to the formation of coal; in all these areas and many more, Erasmus made a valuable and original contribution to knowledge. For me though, it is the combination of The Other Darwin Genius’s bon-viveur attitude, innovatory energy, rationality, compassion, and his measured disrespect for authority, convention and the status quo, that makes him (and I know this is blasphemy) the more interesting Darwin. Spare him a thought on February 12th.
Other Links Erasmusdarwin.org – custodians of his memory and former home in Litchfield.
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