Erasmus Darwin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portrait of Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby (1792)
Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin (born December 12, 1731 in Elton / Nottinghamshire , † April 18, 1802 in Derby ) was a British poet , naturalist , doctor and inventor who was one of the leading intellectuals of the 18th century. His grandchildren include Charles Darwin , the founder of modern evolution , and Francis Galton , who is considered the father of behavioral genetics .

Life

Education and professional life

Erasmus Darwin was born near Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire, the youngest of four sons. After first attending Chesterfield School, he went to St John's College in Cambridge from 1750 to 1754 , where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts . He studied medicine in Edinburgh and opened a practice in Nottingham in 1756. After only two months he had to close it again due to the low success. The following year he moved to Lichfield near Birmingham , where he practiced for over twenty years and became one of the most famous doctors in England. Even the king asked him repeatedly and in vain to become his personal physician: “Why doesn't Dr Darwin come to London? He shall be my physician if he comes. " ("Why isn't Doctor Darwin coming to London? He's supposed to be my doctor when he comes.")

From the conservative, ecclesiastical side, Erasmus Darwin was sharply attacked for his statements on evolutionary theory and criticism of the state and the church. For example, Georg Canning published derisive parodies of Darwin's verses in Anti-Jacobin under the title Die Liebe der Dreiecke . It ridiculed the idea that people could ever benefit from electricity, that people could have evolved from "lower" forms of life, that the mountains could be older than the Bible says. "Canning had seen the subversiveness of Darwin's thoughts very clearly and managed to ruin his reputation as a poet."

1781 moved Darwin to Derby (county Derbyshire ).

Wives and offspring

Family ties with other members of the Lunar Society and their descendants

Erasmus Darwin's first marriage in 1757 was the seventeen-year-old Mary Howard (1740-1770). This connection produced five children, a daughter and four sons, but two of them died in infancy. Erasmus Darwin's eldest son, Charles Darwin, died at the age of 20 from a minor injury sustaining a brain dissection on a child while studying medicine in Edinburgh. His second son, Erasmus, became a lawyer and committed suicide at the age of 40.

The third son, Robert Waring Darwin , also became a well-known doctor and the father of Charles Darwin , who would later write a biography about his grandfather.

After the death of his first wife, at the age of 50 after moving to Derby, Erasmus Darwin married the attractive widow Elizabeth Collier Dingveral-Pole (1747-1832), 16 years his junior. With her he had seven other children, including Frances Anne Violetta, the mother of Francis Galton . The connection aroused great amazement at the time, because Erasmus Darwin and the late husband, Colonel Dingeveral-Pole, had been enemies. He also beat out a lot of better looking rivals. Darwin had been missing a few front teeth since his youth, was pockmarked, and, thanks to his blessed appetite, was very overweight. In 1776 he had a semicircle sawed out of his dining table so that he could still sit down with his stomach. In 1802 the Darwins moved to Breadsall Priory and started building a small botanical garden there. Erasmus Darwin died that same year at the age of 71.

Darwin also had an extramarital affair with Mary Parker, which resulted in two daughters who were raised with the other children.

Act

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Natural sciences

Erasmus Darwin formulated numerous ideas on the phylogenetic development of organisms in his work Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796). This came to him both from observing the behavior of domestic animals and from his extensive knowledge of the natural sciences. Other thoughts came to him, which his grandson Charles Darwin later took up again. For example, the idea that all living things descend from a common ancestor and that a family tree of all life forms must be constructed.

The discovery of fossils from extinct animal species led him to conclude that life on earth evolved from microscopic shells. When asked how another species emerges from one species, his ideas were in part very similar to those of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck or Lamarckism , but he also spoke about the effect of "sexual selection" and competition on education of kinds of thoughts.

Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia was placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum by the Catholic Church , but The Origin of Species by his grandson Charles Darwin was not.

poetry

Erasmus Darwin was also a respected poet in his day. He also put his ideas about nature into verse. The following is an excerpt from his work The Botanic Garden , A Poem in Two Parts: Part 1, The Economy of Vegetation, from 1791:

Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime,
mark with bright curves the printless steps of time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; -
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
- Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
and soars and shines, another and the same.

In a poem, he expresses his theory of evolution in a good two thousand verses (from the posthumously published volume The Temple of Nature in 1803 ). An excerpt:

“Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives
With vanquish'd Death - and Happiness survives;
How Life increasing peoples every clime
And young renascent Nature conquers Time. "

“Calls around the earth as procreation arises,
conquers death - and happiness survives all around;
How life grows constantly far and wide,
And nature, giving birth, conquers time itself. "

In the same poem, like Jules Verne , he also predicts future technological developments in humans:

"Bid raised in air the ponderous structure stand,
Or pour obedient rivers through the land;
With crowds unnumbered crowd the living streets
Or people oceans with triumphant fleets. "

“Mighty buildings rise high in the air,
Or force obedient rivers into new beds;
Countless multitudes crowd the living streets,
And triumphant fleets spread across the oceans. "

Inventions

In addition to his work as a doctor, poet and natural scientist, Erasmus Darwin also worked as an inventor of various devices. For example, he invented a horizontal windmill for Josiah Wedgwood , Charles Darwin's other grandfather.

Erasmus Darwin was also the first to invent an improved design for steering in carriages. Carriage rides in England were notoriously dangerous during the eighteenth century, as the bumpy and holey roads exacerbated deficiencies in steering, suspension and stability. In 1758 the young Dr. Erasmus Darwin travels a lot as a doctor and has to visit his patients about 10,000 miles a year from his home in Lichfield. To alleviate the danger and discomfort from his journey, in 1761 he developed a design for an improved steering slide and stub axle steering for stability , which he tested in driving tests over 20,000 miles on two carriages. It differs from the rotatable drawbar with turntable mounting that is common on carriages . In 1768 he was thrown out of a carriage he had invented during a test drive and injured his knee so badly that he continued to hobble afterwards. In 1765, Richard Lovell Edgeworth had heard about Darwin's knuckle design and asked the Society of Arts to inquire about it. Then he visited Darwin himself to inquire with him. With the help of manuscripts from the archives of the Royal Society of Arts and elsewhere, a reconstruction of Darwin's improved method for this steering could be made, which relied on four articulated rods in the form of an isosceles trapezoid.

He made notes on the potential inventions while driving from one home visit to the next (including about water closets, a coal cart, a “talking machine”, a mechanical ferry, centrifugal pumps and rocket engines). However, he did not apply for a patent for any of his inventions, as he believed it would damage his reputation as a doctor. Instead, he encouraged his friends to patent their own modifications of his work.

Memberships

In 1754 Darwin became a member of the Freemasons Association ( St. David's Lodge No. 36 in Edinburgh ).

In 1761 he became a member of the Royal Society . Since 1792 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

In 1765 he was one of the founders of the influential Lunar Society , which maintained the scientific exchange of ideas between leading minds in England and existed until 1813. Its members included James Watt , Matthew Boulton and Benjamin Franklin (corresponding member). A year later he met Jean-Jacques Rousseau , with whom he was later in contact by letter.

obituary

Some works consider Erasmus Darwin to be "one of the most brilliant personalities who has ever lived in British soil", and he was regarded as a doctor, scientist and poet. The reputation he enjoyed in his time is shown by a quote from the philosopher Samuel Coleridge from 1796 about Erasmus Darwin: "I think he is the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man."

After his death, however, he was quickly forgotten - especially outside the UK. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the genius Erasmus Darwin was rediscovered in several biographies by the geophysicist Desmond King-Hele .

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Desmond King-Hele: Erasmus Darwin . Macmillan, 1963.
  • Ernst Ludwig Krause: Erasmus Darwin and his position in the history of the descent theory by Ernst Krause. With his life and character pictures of Charles Darwin . E. Günther, Leipzig 1880
  • Ernst Ludwig Krause: Erasmus Darwin . D. Appleton, New York 1880, archive.org
  • Anna Seward: Memoirs of the life of Dr. Darwin, chiefly during his residence at Lichfield; with anecdotes of his friends, and criticisms on his writings . J. Johnson, London 1804, archive.org
  • Otto Zöckler : Darwin's grandfather as a doctor, poet and natural philosopher. A contribution to the prehistory of Darwinism . Heidelberg 1880

Web links

Wikisource: Erasmus Darwin  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Erasmus Darwin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Brian W. Aldiss: The Million Years Dream. The history of science fiction . Bastei-Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 1980, p. 33.
  2. ^ Brian W. Aldiss: The Million Years Dream. The history of science fiction . Bastei-Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 1980, p. 32 f.
  3. ↑ Erasmus Darwin Freemason . Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon “A Few Famous Masons”, accessed January 29, 2013
  4. ^ Erasmus Darwin'S Improved Design For Steering Carriages — And Cars . (PDF; p. 46f .; 2.1 MB) Royal Society; accessed January 29, 2013
  5. ↑ Member History: Erasmus Darwin. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 6, 2018 .
  6. ^ Erasmus Darwin'S Improved Design For Steering Carriages — And Cars . (PDF; p. 42f .; 2.1 MB) Royal Society; accessed January 29, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Darwin, Erasmus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet, botanist and physician
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1731
PLACE OF BIRTH Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1802
Place of death Derby