Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DOCTOR DARWIN by Hesketh Pearson. 235 pages. Walker...
...eyes of the British, eccentricity often looks like genius. In his own time (1731-1802), Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, was renowned not only as Britain's foremost physician but as a poet, scientist, inventor and conversationalist of formidable talent. He had, said Coleridge, "a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe," and King George III begged him to come to London as the royal physician (he refused, on the ground that he preferred to remain in Lichfield). The age's other great eccentric, Samuel Johnson, dismissed him as a provincial from an "intellectually barren...
Decoction of Foxglove. All biographers of Erasmus Darwin are dependent on a contemporary account written by a poetess and neighbor, Miss Anna Seward, sometimes known as "the Swan of Lichfield." Anna carried on a lifelong flirtation with him (they exchanged playful love letters on behalf of their cats), and remembered him as a man given to "sarcasm of very keen edge" and so "inclined to corpulence" that he had to have a semicircular hole cut in the table to accommodate him at meals. "A fool," the doctor used to say to Anna, "is a man who never tried an experiment...
Survival of the Fittest. Even as staunch an admirer as Coleridge found Darwin's poetry "nauseating." Nevertheless, The Botanic Garden, a scientific treatise in rhymed couplets, was a bestseller during his lifetime, and its descriptive lines were vastly admired by many of his contemporaries...
...Darwin had taken the lines, almost word for word, from Anna Seward, and after the poem was published, the Seward-Darwin cat correspondence ended. But The Botanic Garden was so popular that otherwise sober critics judged Darwin a greater poet than Milton...