and Lamarck, both in order of time and sequence of ideas, Erasmus Darwin, the distinguished grandfather of Charles Darwin. Born at Eton, near Newark, in 1731, he walked the hospitals at London and Edinburgh, and settled, for some years, at Lichfield, ultimately removing to Derby. Since Lucretius, no scientific writer had put his cosmogonic speculations into verse until Dr. Darwin made the heroic metre, in which stereotyped form the poetry of his time was cast, the vehicle of rhetorical descriptions of the amours of flowers and the evolution of the thumb. The Loves of the Plants, ridiculed in the Loves of the Triangles in the Anti-Jacobin, is not to be named in the same breath, for stateliness of diction, and majesty of movement, as the De rerum Natura. But both the prose work Zoonomia and the poem The Temple of Nature (published after the author's death in 1802) have claim to notice as the matured expression of conclusions at which the clear-sighted, thoughtful, and withal, eccentric doctor had arrived in the closing years of his life. Krause's Life and Study of the Works of Erasmus Darwin supplies an excellent outline of the contents of books which are now rarely taken down from the shelves, and makes clear that their author had the root of the matter in him. His observations and reading, for the influence of Buffon and others is apparent in his writings, led him to reject the current belief in the separate creation of species. He saw that this theory wholly failed to account for the existence of abnormal forms, of adaptations of the structure of organs to their work, of gradations between living things, and other features inconsistent with the doctrine of "let lions be, and there were lions." His shrewd comment on the preformation notion of development has been quoted (p. 20). The substance of his argument in support of a "physical basis of life" is as follows: "When we revolve in our minds the metamorphosis of animals, as from the tadpole to the frog; secondly, the changes produced by artificial cultivation, as in the breeds of horses, dogs, and sheep; thirdly, the changes produced by conditions of climate and of season, as in the sheep of warm climates being covered with hair instead of wool, and the hares and partridges of northern climates becoming white in winter; when, further, we observe the changes of structure produced by habit, as seen especially by men of different occupations; or the changes produced by artificial mutilation and prenatal influences, as in the crossing of species and production of monsters; fourth, when we observe the essential unity of plan in all warm-blooded animals--we are led to conclude that they have been alike produced from a similar living filament." The concluding words of this extract make remarkable approach to the modern theory of the origin of life in the complex jelly-like protoplasm, or, as some call it, nuclein or nucleoplasm. And, on this, Erasmus Darwin further remarks: "As the