CHAPTER V.

DR. ERASMUS DARWIN-CONCLUDED.

IT is one of the Lamarckian dogmas of Erasmus, that "the means of providing food has diversified the forms. of all species of animals." And this is illustrated at great length by reference to the hardened snout of the grubbing swine, the elongated nose of the elephant (for the enabling of it to drink and to pull down branches to eat), the claws and talons of the beasts of prey, the rough tongues of the browsing cattle, the beaks and bills of birds (respectively, as needs were, hard or soft, long or broad, sharp, etc.): "All which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavour of the creatures to supply the want of food, and to have been delivered to their posterity with constant improvement of them, for the purpose required." Even wings seem to Erasmus but as results-results of the endeavours of the feet for speed; and, similarly so, many other diversified forms, as length of fin to the flying-fish, spread of membrane to the bat, hard or armed shells to the tortoise and the echinus marinus. The snake, and wild cat, and leopard are so coloured as to resemble dark leaves and their lighter interstices; and moths and butterflies are painted like the flowers which they rob of their honey.

"These colours have, however, in some instances "

and this is very interesting-" another use, as in the black diverging area from the eyes of the swan; which, as his eyes are placed less prominent than those of other birds, for the convenience of putting down his head under water, prevents the rays of light from being reflected into his eye; and thus dazzling his sight, both in air and beneath the water; which must have happened if that surface had been white like the rest of his feathers." (How about the "black swan"-pace all the other divers ?) In the same way we have the various colours of eggs rationalised, and then this "The final cause of these colours is easily understood, as they serve some purposes of the animal, but the efficient cause would seem almost beyond conjecture." The efficient Cause!

The efficient cause of these and all things is, according to the spontaneous, unreflected, instinct of humanity, simply the will of God.

According to philosophy (which on that head, however, has a good deal more to say for itself), that cause and that will could only be a reasoned universe, a rational object, which, like God Himself, the rational subject, could not-in fact-not be!

In

Charles Darwin will have neither interpretation. explanation (just of all and everything), he will take at once a formed organism-into the premises of which he will simply not inquire-and once in possession of this organism (which, too, without inquiry, is to be endowed with the power of propagation), he will see the accidents of the individual (and every individual has accidents"I believe most beings vary at all times") accumulate and accumulate, by the further known necessary fact of successive propagation-accumulate into a new en

1 Life and Letters, ii. 123: “I believe most beings vary at all times enough for selection to act on." But how if every variation always returns, less or more, to the original?

semble which is a new species; and this is Natural Selection, "the law of Natural Selection that has now been discovered."

"The old argument from design in nature-fails," he says, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered!"

Leaving, however, what relates further to animals, let us pass to a word or two of the numerous similar references to plants. It is by what concerns security that he (Erasmus) is led here also: "The contrivances for the purposes of security extend even to vegetables, as is seen in the wonderful and various means of their concealing or defending their honey from insects, and their seeds from birds" (Krause, p. 182). At first, he opines (p. 185), there would be few vegetables, but those would intermarry, and increase. There would be contests among them for light and air above, as for food and moisture below-leading necessarily to changes of structure in them. Single bulbs would assume to themselves more bulbs-would become at last, as trees, a compound of many bulbs each "a swarm of vegetables." Necessarily there would be varieties among them. Thus some, too weak of themselves, would "learn to adhere to their neighbours, either by putting forth roots like the ivy, or by tendrils like the vine, or by spiral contortions like the honeysuckle; or by growing upon them like the mistletoe, and taking nourishment from their barks, or by only lodging or adhering on to them, and deriving nourishment from the air as Tillandsia. This plant never germinates on the ground, but is borne by the wind till the filaments of its long capillary plume are caught and entangled." On all these contrivances of plumes, hooks, etc., Erasmus is specially full. But still to him there must be conteststruggle." Even for that element of theory (as we have

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seen already at pp. 45 and 49), Erasmus might have sufficed Charles, without resort to Malthus. The struggle entails for Erasmus "more exquisite pleasure;" and "higher organisation is the result." Even when internecine," it serves to increase the sum of happiness of the survivors." So it is that Erasmus is able to put himself quite at home with the "double edge" we have already seen. If, on the one side, there are admirable and perpetually improving appliances for defence, there are, on the other side, equally admirable and equally perpetually improving expedients for attack: so that what is permanent is alone battle, πόλεμος πάντων μὲν TаTρ. "Swiftness of wing has been acquired by hawks πατήρ. and swallows to secure their prey; and a proboscis of admirable structure has been acquired by the bee, the moth, and the humming-bird, for plundering the nectaries of flowers. All which seem to have been formed by the original organic filament, excited into action by the necessities of the creatures which possess them, and on which their existence depends." And so, the strain continues, considering all these things, "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 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 those improvements by generations to its posterity, world without end?" Respective filaments there may be, and, so, different the one from the other, for the various tribes, warm-blooded, cold-blooded, insects, vermes, plants, etc.; but still," As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these

animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?"

So much for organic life, though this is accompanied by much else in regard to spontaneous generation, sexuality and asexuality, etc.; but, as we have already seen in reference to lime, Erasmus has not grudged to direct his regards to the whole also. The world is to be supposed due to generation from smalls to smalls rather than from creation at once-" produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty Fiat. For it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects than to cause the effects themselves." So Hume at one time held (Inquiry, vii. 1) that it argued "more wisdom in the Deity" to conceive a world, not further dependent on Himself, but, for advance, with inherent principles of its own. It is with as much as this in his mind that Erasmus exclaims, "What a magnificent idea of the infinite Power!"

Dr. Darwin opens his Zoonomia with a motto from Virgil the well-known four lines from the sixth Æneid, according to which a spirit within nourishes all, a mind, infused throughout, animates the mass. And his very first paragraph reprobates those who, "idly ingenious, busied themselves in attempting to explain the laws of life by those of mechanism and chemistry, and considered the body as an hydraulic machine, and the fluids as passing through a series of chemical changes, forgetting that animation was its essential characteristic." To this he had a perception which was wanting to Charles-a perception possessed as yet only by one other known to me. Cause he saw, as cause, was a category confined to the lower elements, and had no place in the