Word: darwinism
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...ERASMUS DARWIN by Desmond King-Hele. 183 pages. Scribner...
...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...
Macleod's revelation revived once again the controversy over the Tories' strange "evolutionary" method of choosing a Prime Minister, suggested that the technique owed more to Machiavelli than to Darwin. It also showed fissures in a party which traditionally has gained much of its public strength by presenting a sound, "nonfissiparous" image. Though Macleod's caustic chronicle came in reply to a fulsomely pro-Macmillan book by Journalist Randolph Churchill, and thus allowed Macleod to appear only to be setting the record straight, many Britons sensed the beginnings of a new leadership battle. If the Conservatives lose...