“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Erasmus Darwin HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1619

In , William Harvey confirmed the fact of circulation of the blood. What remained to be figured out was the mechanism by which this was occurring — as we didn’t as yet know of the network of capillaries inside the tissue by which the circuit is completed. Between this year and 1628 he would be constructing his theory of circulation.

THE SCIENCE OF 1619 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1621

The botanist John Tradescant joins the service of the Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers. At Oxford, founding of the 1st botanic garden in Britain, by Lord Henry Danvers, the Earl of Danby, 76 years after the founding of the 1st continental garden. This was probably inspired by John Tradescant’s garden of exotic plants in South Lambeth.

THE SCIENCE OF 1621 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1690

Denis Papin published his first work on the steam engine, DE NOVIS QUIBUSDAM MACHINIS. The function of his steam engine was to raise water into a canal between Kassel and Karlshaven. He also used a steam engine to pump water to a tank on the palace roof, that supplied water for the fountains in the gardens. THE SCIENCE OF 1690 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1698

Thomas Savery’s “fire engine,” the first working steam engine, amounted to a pump operated by steam power which had no moving parts. THE SCIENCE OF 1698 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1705

In 1698, Thomas Savery had patented a steam engine. When Herr Professor G.W. von Leibnitz sent Denis Papin a sketch of a steam engine, Papin began working on that topic again and would author THE NEW ART OF PUMPING WATER BY USING STEAM (1707). He designed a safety valve to prevent the pressure of steam building up to dangerous levels. Other inventions which Papin worked on were the construction of a submarine, an air gun, and a grenade launcher. He tried to build up a glass industry in Hesse-Kassel and also experimented with preserving food both with chemicals and using a vacuum. This was the year, however, of Thomas Newcomen’s improved “fire engine.” Applying Thomas Savery’s principle of the condensation of steam to produce a vacuum, he applied the atmospheric pressure not to shove a column of water up a pipe but to shove a metal piston from one end to another of a cylinder. This device was more general in its application because it produced a mechanical motion which could then be used to drive anything: for instance, it could drive a conventional water pump — but it could also turn the crank of a spinning machine. THE SCIENCE OF 1705 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1712

In this year, at some point, Denis Papin, the developer of a steam engine, died in London, . In this year, at some point, some half century or more before James Watt, Thomas Newcomen developed a workable steam pump for use in mines. THE SCIENCE OF 1712 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1731

December 12, Sunday (Old Style): Erasmus Darwin was born at Elston Hall near Newark, which is near Nottingham in Nottinghamshire. He would grow up to have his speech impeded by a stammer. His grandson Charles Robert would write of the family name that it was an unusual name, and that: Erasmus Darwin was descended from a family of yeoman who lived for several generations on their own land, apparently of considerable extent, at Marton in Lincolnshire. He stammered greatly, and it is surprising that this defect did not spoil his powers of conversation. A young man once asked him in, as he thought, an offensive manner, whether he did not find stammering very inconvenient. He answered, “No, Sir, it gives me time for reflection, and saves me from answering impertinent questions.” Manners seem to have been very coarse in those old days. A notorious man, Dr. Caleb Hardinge, who seems to have lived in good society, said to my grandfather, “my dear doctor, you have a damned ugly trick of stuttering; I am sure I could cure you.” To which my grandfather replied, alluding, evidently to the swearing, “Physician, heal thyself.” The lad would be educated at Cambridge and and would settle first near and later at Derby. He would turn out to be a remarkable polymath, and would be a best-selling poet during the same period in which he would be earning his living as a country doctor, while simultaneously having activities as a naturalist, as a medical botanist, and as an inventor of actual “indeed it does work” mechanical devices.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Erasmus Darwin “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1731 OLD STYLE / 1732 NEW STYLE

January 13, Friday (1731, Old Style): Erasmus Darwin was baptized at Elston Church in Newark, Nottinghamshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1737

A maid-servant accidentally struck Erasmus Darwin on the middle of his head. Ever afterward a white lock of hair would mark this spot. (Another undated boyhood incident: while fishing with his brothers, he was put into a bag with only his feet out and as a result almost drowned.) TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Erasmus Darwin “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1740

Upon the death of his mother, Joseph Priestley went to live with his aunt, a person with strong nonconformist religious views. He would attend Bately Grammar School but after three years ill health would force him to return home. He was a brilliant student and with the help of local teachers, became proficient in physics, philosophy, algebra, mathematics, and several different languages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1741

Erasmus Darwin was sent to Chesterfield School for a classical and literary education. While playing at school with Lord George Cavendish, he would be badly injured in a gunpowder explosion.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Erasmus Darwin “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1750

June 30, Saturday (Old Style): Erasmus Darwin and his brother John were admitted to St John’s College of Cambridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1751

May: Erasmus Darwin’s 1st published poem, “Death of Prince Frederick.”

The church in Lincoln voted to receive any member of the church in Concord who might be dismissed.

July: Erasmus Darwin’s 2d published poem, “To Mr Gurney.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1753

January-April: Probably it was during this period that Erasmus Darwin was attending Dr. William Hunter’s lectures on anatomy in London.

October: Erasmus Darwin left London to visit a medical school in Edinburgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1755

June: Probably it was at this point that Erasmus Darwin received his M.B. degree from Cambridge.

October: Probably it was at this point that Erasmus Darwin began his studies at Edinburgh Medical School. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1756

June: Erasmus Darwin completed his studies at Edinburgh Medical School. Presumably, at this point he qualified as a medical doctor.

November 12, Friday, 1756: Dr. Erasmus Darwin arrived at Lichfield to begin a new medical practice. (Previously he had tried to establish his medical practice, and failed, at Nottingham, having had only one patient, who had died without paying any compensation for his care — a shoemaker who had been drunkenly stabbed by another shoemaker. We should not, however, judge too harshly such an initial failure, since we know from our own experience in the history of the town of Concord, Massachusetts, that people do tend to have difficulty in accepting a physician who has a speech impediment.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1757

May 6, Friday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s paper on “Ascent of Vapour” was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (We now characterize him as the first person to properly explain cloud formation. His model of the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere would be the accepted one until the 1950s.)

THE SCIENCE OF 1757

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Erasmus Darwin HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

December 30, Friday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Mary (Polly) Howard, 17-18 years old, were wed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1758

The Eastern Screech Owl Otus asio and the Long-Eared Owl Asio otus were 1st described and classified, in a vastly enlarged 10th edition of Carolus Linnaeus’s SYSTEMA NATURAE (SYSTEM OF NATURE) which

THE SCIENCE OF 1758 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

included a classification of over 4,000 species of such Animalia.

WALDEN: Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, –only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, –a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, –no gate, –no front-yard, –and no path to the civilized world!

WHIPPOORWILL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

WALDEN: For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, PEOPLE OF I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl WALDEN indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o’clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson’s Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard.

OVID? CANADA GOOSE This 10th edition included human beings — which Carolus Linnaeus was the 1st to designate as Homo sapiens. Clearly obvious from some of his depictions is the fact that he was uncertain how to differentiate apes from humans. Since he hadn’t been able to discover such a differentia, he employed obviously empty conventions such as “day man” versus “night man.” He opinioned the following as to the races of his human species: • a. Wild shaggy hair, mute, four-footed. • b. American red, choleric, erect; thick, straight, black hair; distended nostrils; freckled face; beardless chin; obstinate, gay, free. He paints himself with variegated, red lines. He is ruled by custom. • c. European white, sanguine, muscular; long, blond hair; blue eyes; gentle, most intelligent; a discoverer. He covers himself with clothing suitable to the northern climate. He is ruled by religious custom. • d. Asiatic yellow, melancholy, rigid; dark hair; dark eyes; austere, arrogant, greedy. He covers himself with loose clothing. He is ruled by opinion. • e. African black, phlegmatic, lax; black, curly hair; silky skin, apelike nose; swollen lips; the bosoms of the women are distended; their breasts give milk copiously; crafty, slothful, careless. He smears himself with fat. He is ruled by authority. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

• f. Monster divided into two groups: those so by nature as dwarfs and giants; and those so by custom as eunuchs, and peoples with compressed or elongated heads.

September: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s 1st son Charles was born. The child would be, like his father, a stammerer. (He would find, curiously, that by switching from English into French, he could frequently circumvent his speech impediment.)

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Erasmus Darwin HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1759

Dr. Erasmus Darwin, an inveterate tinkerer, devised an improved technique for the steering of carriages, and road-tested it for a total of over 20,000 miles. (It is the system that, patented by others, would be employed for our early modern automobiles.)

October: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s 2d son Erasmus was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1760

During this decade Dr. Erasmus Darwin would be prescribing opium in massive doses as a cure-all. He may have been instrumental in the addiction of his friend Thomas Wedgewood. ’s wife Tetty’s death was associated with opium use. Johnson himself left off his own opiate use before his death: “I will take no more physic, not even my opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.” Horace Walpole remembered Lady Stafford commenting, on an occasion when she had forgotten to take her opium, “Well...I have arrived without my wit today,” — “which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits.” Wellington commented regarding the excesses of George IV, that: “He drinks spirits morning, noon and night; and is obliged to take laudenum [opium mixed with alcohol] to calm the irritation which the use of spirits occasions.” Jane Austen’s mother used opium.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Erasmus Darwin “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1761

April: Dr. Erasmus Darwin was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1762

October: Dr. Erasmus Darwin dissected the cadaver of a hanged “malefactor.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1763

James Watt was sent a Newcomen steam engine to repair. While putting it back into working order, Watt discovered how he could make the engine more efficient. Watt worked on the idea for several months and eventually produced a steam engine that cooled the used steam in a condenser separate from the main cylinder. James Watt was not a wealthy man so he decided to seek a partner with money. John Roebuck, the owner of a Scottish ironworks, agreed to provide financial backing for Watt’s project. In about this year Dr. Erasmus Darwin, an inveterate tinkerer, sketched a design for a steam car and suggested a joint project with Matthew Boulton to construct such a self-powered vehicle. (Nothing would come of this, else there might have been a car designated the Darwin rather than a car designated the Porsche.)1

1. Guess what! The first self-powered road vehicle, developed in France in 1769, would be a failure and would be consigned to the Warehouse of Bad Ideas after a road accident in 1771 — and this first self-powered road vehicle would be a failure because it neglected to use an effective steering mechanism such as the arrangement that had already been developed by Dr. Darwin in England.

Guess what! Dr. Darwin would not be the only person to come to Boulton & Watt with the idea of a self-powered vehicle. One of their own engineers, William Murdock, would construct such a vehicle in Cornwall in 1784 — and after he had on his own hook produced a functioning prototype they would extract a promise from him that he abandon it entirely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1764

Dr. Erasmus Darwin invested in the formation of Wychnor Ironworks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1765

Dr. Erasmus Darwin met Josiah Wedgewood and became involved with him in the promotion of the Grand

Trunk Canal. He wrote a pamphlet in favor of this canal project. (These would be the two grandfathers of .) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1766

James Brindley began building the Trent and Mersey section of England’s Grand Trunk Canal.

May: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s 3d son Robert was born. (would be father of Charles Robert Darwin).

Summer: Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who had already met Benjamin Franklin by 1760, met Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

He met Rousseau by a subterfuge. Rousseau was living for a year in a hermit’s lair on the terrace at Mr. Davenport’s Wooton Hall in the Weaver Hills of north-east Staffordshire –it being all the rage at the time for a wealthy man to use some ornamental hermit to complete his garden– and Darwin strolled by the entrance to this cave and paused to minutely examine a plant growing in front of it. This drew out the Frenchman and they conversed. (Although after this he and Rousseau occasionally corresponded, we don’t have a record of the correspondence.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1767

Dr. Erasmus Darwin met James Watt and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

February 7, Saturday: When Dr. Erasmus Darwin was asked to examine the corpse of a baby thought to have been the illegitimate child of a lady and thought to have been murdered by its mother, he provided that medical service as requested, describing the condition of the corpse in fine detail, but added in his medical report a moral observation that “The Women that have committed this most unnatural crime, are real objects of our greatest Pity; their education has produced in them so much Modesty, or sense of Shame, that this artificial Passion oveturns the very instincts of Nature! —what Struggles must there be in their minds, what agonies! —at a Time when, after the Pains of Parturition, Nature has designed them the sweet Consolation of giving Suck to a little helpless Babe, that depends on them for its hourly existence! Hence the cause of this most horrid crime is an excess of what is really a Virtue, of the Sense of Shame, or Modesty. Such is the Condition of human Nature!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1768

Dr. Erasmus Darwin constructed a small carriage, which he intended to use both to optimize the power of the horse, and the ease of turning. It consisted of a sort of platform with a seat, upon a very high pair of wheels, which was supported in front by an arch reaching over the hind quarters of the horse. A saddle on the horse had a socket on top, and the arch was attached to this socket by a ring. Although an arrangement similar to this would be given, in America, the name “Equibus,” Dr. Darwin’s version apparently did not work very well, as he upset in it and broke a knee-cap. Evidently then he ended his experiment with the apparatus. Ever after, he would limp a little.

Completion of publication in this year, with Part III, of the 12th edition of Carolus Linnaeus’s SYSTEMA NATURAE (SYSTEM OF NATURE), an enormous tome. Dr. Adam Kuhn of Philadelphia, who had studied under Linnaeus, was probably the 1st professor of botany in America — he was chair of botany at the University of Pennsylvania. BOTANIZING

The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s book on politics, AN ESSAY ON THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT AND THE NATURE OF POLITICAL, CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY, argued for the development of a political system that maximized civil liberty. In a statement that was to have an influence on the work of Jeremy Bentham and his ideas on Unitarianism, Priestley wrote: “The good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of the state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined.” In the largest states, if the abuses of government should, at any time be great and manifest; if the servants of the people, forgetting their masters, and their masters’ interest, should pursue a separate one of their own; if, instead of considering that they are made for the people, they should consider the people as made for them; if the oppressions and violations of right should be great, flagrant, and universally resented; if the tyrannical governors should have no friends but a few sycophants, who had long preyed upon the vitals of their fellow citizens, and who might be expected to desert a government, whenever their interests should be detached from it: if, in consequence of these circumstances, it should become manifest, that the risk, which would be run in attempting a revolution would be trifling, and the evils which might be apprehended from it, were far less than these which were actually suffered, and which were daily increasing; in the name of God, I ask, what principles are those, which ought to restrain an injured and insulted people from asserting their natural rights, and from changing, or even punishing their governors that is their servants, who had abused their trust; or from altering the whole form of their government, if it appeared to be of a structure so liable to abuse? To say that these forms of government have been long established, and that these oppressions have been long suffered, without any complaint, is to supply the strongest argument for their abolition. Nothing can more justly excite the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

indignation of an honest and oppressed citizen, than to hear a prelate, who enjoys a considerable benefice, under a corrupt government, pleading for its support by those abominable perversions of scripture, which have been too common on this occasion; as by urging in its favour that passage of St. Paul, “The powers which be are ordained of God”, and others of a similar import. It is a sufficient answer to such an absurd quotation as this, that, for the same reason, the powers which will be will be ordained of God also. It will be said, that it is opening a door to rebellion, to assert that magistrates, abusing their power, may be set aside by the people, who are of course their own judges when that power is abused. May not the people, it is said, abuse their power, as well as their governors? I answer, it is very possible they may abuse their power: it is possible they may imagine themselves oppressed when they are not: it is possible that their animosity may be artfully and unreasonably inflamed, by ambitious and enterprising men, whose views are often best answered by popular tumults and insurrections; and the people may suffer in consequence of their folly and precipitancy. But what man is there, or what body of men (whose right to direct their own conduct was never called in question) but are liable to be imposed upon, and to suffer in consequence of their mistaken apprehensions and precipitate conduct? English history will inform us, that the people of this country have always borne extreme oppression, for a long time before there has appeared any danger of a general insurrection against the government. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1769

James Watt obtained a patent on a technique for “A New Invented Method of lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines.” He had recognized that worst inefficiency of the Newcomen design was the heat required to convert a substance back and forth between its solid and its liquid phase, known as “latent heat,” and his new design minimized this problem by effecting condensation in a chamber connected to the engine cylinder but distinct from it. HISTORY OF RR STEAM ENGINES HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1770

2 Dr. Erasmus Darwin had his portrait done, by Joseph Wright, and began the writing of ZOONOMIA.

His deep small pox pits were of course omitted from the painting.

THE SCIENCE OF 1770

His wife Mary (Polly) Howard Darwin died “after a long and suffering illness.” The grandson Charles Robert 2. Although Dr. Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert would read ZOONOMIA at the age of 16 or 17, he would report later in life that the poem had been without effect on his mind. He hadn’t even retained a memory of what his family’s motto E conchis omnia was, or what it signified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

would report that “judging from all that I have heard of her, [she] must have been a superior and charming woman.” “They seem to have lived together most happily during the thirteen years of their married life, and she was tenderly nursed by her husband during her last illness.”

In this year he had the new motto E conchis omnia, “Everything from shells,” added to the painting on his coach door of the Darwin family’s coat of arms (which had pictured three scallop shells). The image below is not what was painted on his coach door, but what he would have engraved for a bookplate in the following year:

Unfortunately, the Canon of , the Reverend Thomas Seward (father of the poet who would fall in love with Dr. Darwin, would be rejected for another, and, after her love’s death, would author a scathing and demonstrably false biography), would spot the reference, and –in satirical verse– would accuse his neighbor of renouncing his creator, and would exhort him to change that “foolish motto.” Great wizard he! by magic spells Can all things raise from cockle shells Dr. Darwin would need to have his coach repainted to remove this offensive material.3 PALEONTOLOGY

The biographer Desmond King-Hele acknowledges that it is Charles Darwin, not his grandfather Erasmus, who created the theory of evolution, but seems not to comprehend why this is so:

Charles Darwin read ZOONOMIA when he was sixteen or seventeen, and also listened to a panegyric in praise of evolution from his 3.Imagine parking in the parking lot of your local fundie church, nowadays, with one of those “Darwin” fish-with-legs logos on the trunk lid of your car! Why was such a motto so offensive? –Because the official story then, which would be the official story during Charles Darwin’s life as well, and would be the official story during Henry Thoreau’s life, and would be the official story at the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, and is still the official story, as for instance the official belief system of the Wubya administration of born-again Christians — is that our lives, to be of significance to us, to be meaningful to us, must have a divine purpose and legitimation. (That’s why we attacked Iraq — Wubya’s God told him he needed to “take Saddam out.” Wubya’s administration wasn’t mainly about stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Wubya’s life, in fact, post-salvation, has divine purpose and legitimation. It is now a life as full of meaning, as once it was full of drunken revels.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

friend Dr Robert Grant at Edinburgh University. “At this time I greatly admired the ZOONOMIA,” he says. But neither Grant nor ZOONOMIA had “any effect on my mind.” This is true: otherwise he would have become an evolutionist before going on , rather than after. Therefore, perhaps, I should here explicate why it was that creating the theory of evolution was left for Charles, and why it was that the early reading of ZOONOMIA, with its recognition of evolution, did nothing in this regard: it is one thing to regard evolution as a fact, and another thing entirely to create a theory which accounts for it by hypothesizing a plausible mechanism and demonstrating the inevitability of this mechanism. Lots of people regarded evolution as a fact, before Charles created his theory. Almost as many people were perfectly well aware of evolution as a fact in 1770, as had been perfectly well aware in 1491 that the earth was a globe — before Columbus obtained funding to sail west from Spain!

During the 1770s, Erasmus would be helping to found The Birmingham Lunar Society, a social club for the great scientists and industrialists of the day. The society would hold its monthly meetings at the Soho House on the Monday night nearest the full moon, and this supposedly was so that the attenders would afterwards be

able to find their way home. This society has been characterized as the think tank of the . Members of the society included the Reverend Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, Friend Samuel Galton, a wealthy Quaker industrialist who eventually would be disowned due to his manufacture of firearms, William Small, the eccentrics Thomas Day and Richard Edgeworth, the Matthew Boulton who was known as “the creator of Birmingham,” James Watt, , James Keir, and Josiah Wedgewood.

Other personages linked to this society include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and William Murdock, developer of a self-propelled vehicle and the inventor of gas lighting. (Murdock would end his days living at the court of the Shah of Persia, where he would be credited with being an incarnation of Marduk, ancient god of light.) THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1771

In the neighborhood of Paris where the Madeleine now stands, an artilleryman tried to turn a corner at top speed of 2 or 3 mph with the 2d version of Nicholas Cugnot’s 1769 tricycle steam contraption for hauling a 9- ton artillery piece, on which no arrangement whatever had been made for a braking system. The monster flopped onto its side — design flaw in the French steering mechanism! For the next almost 30 years this massive device would stand unused. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

When Dr. Edward Jenner attempted to present info about small pox vaccination to the Royal Society, he was refused permission to present such a “wild idea” which was clearly “at variance with established knowledge.” He was cautioned to fear for his professional reputation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Erasmus Darwin added his new motto E conchis omnia, “Everything from shells,” to his bookplate. THE SCIENCE OF 1771

He began his long-term sexual liaison with 18-year-old Mary Parker.

(One may wonder how this event is reported in the biography of Erasmus by his grandson Charles. On page 26 he mentions his grandfather’s marriage in 1757 to “Miss Mary Howard, aged 17-18 years, who, judging from all that I have heard of her, must have been a superior and charming woman,” and mentions that in 1770 she “died after a long and suffering illness.” “They seem to have lived together most happily during the thirteen years of their married life, and she was tenderly nursed by her husband during her last illness.” Then on pages 30/31, with nothing of significance intervening, he mentions that in 1781, “eleven years after the death of his first wife, Dr. Darwin married the widow of Colonel ... Pole of Redburn Hall. He had become acquainted with her in the spring of 1778, when she had come to Lichfield in order that he might attend her children professionally.” One would expect, therefore, in a Victorian family biography of this sort, there to be no mention at all by the grandson of his grandfather’s long-term mistress Mary Parker, or of his own two Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

great-aunts who were the products of that union. Such an expectation is confounded, however, for Charles writes very plainly on page 64: “In the interval between his first and second marriages, Dr. Darwin became the father of two illegitimate daughters. To his credit be it said that he gave them an excellent education, and from all that I have heard they grew up to be admirable ladies, living on intimate terms with his widow and the children by the second marriage.”)

He would keep the bookplates, after having his carriage door painted over when he was warned by a high church official that this motto amounted to a declaration of irreligion, and was dangerous to him.

The book his grandson Charles Robert later wrote about his life now makes fascinating reading. It has been the fate of many celebrated men with strongly-marked characters to have been grossly calumniated; and few have suffered more in this respect than Erasmus Darwin. This helps us understand what Erasmus was up against, what Charles was up against, what Henry Thoreau was up against, and what we are right now up against. Here we have a physician who was for awhile recognized as the most prominent poet in England, on the basis of his long poems about the history of life on earth — and then the establishment would step in and attempted to destroy his reputation because of the evolutionary ideas he was expressing in this poetry.4

Before he had begun to write this biography of Erasmus, Charles actually had known very little about him and had not valued his achievements. This was the case, the biographer Desmond King-Hele asserts, for socioeconomic reasons: Erasmus had had to work for his living, but his grandchildren were, by virtue of their inheritances of the earned wealth of their progenitors, gentlemen all, who never needed to work for a living. So the Victorian Wedgewoods and Darwins lived affluently and conformed to a well-known syndrome: they preferred to forget the hard work of their grandfathers that made possible their privileged status. By this year the Prince Nursery on Long Island offered 42 varieties of pear. PLANTS

4. Imagine parking in the parking lot of your local fundamentalist church, nowadays, with one of those “Darwin” fish-with-legs logos on the trunk lid of your car! Why was such a motto so offensive? –Because the official story then, which would be the official story during Charles Darwin’s life as well, and would be the official story during Henry Thoreau’s life, and would be the official story at the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, and is still the official story right now, as for instance the official belief system of the Wubya administration of born-again Christians — is that our lives, to be of significance to us, to be meaningful to us, must have a divine purpose and legitimation. (That’s why we’re attacking Iraq — Wubya’s God told him he needs to “take Saddam out.” Wubya’s administration isn’t just about stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Wubya’s life, in fact, has divine purpose and legitimation. It is now a life as full of meaning, as it once was full of drunken parties.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

October: Dr. Erasmus Darwin became intrigued by the idea of constructing a tributary canal of a foot in depth, from Lichfield to the Grand Trunk Canal, along which a workman might drag barges of 4 or 5 tons burthen, thus saving the trouble of horses and waggons. The idea would never come to anything.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Erasmus Darwin HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1772

Dr. Erasmus Darwin constructed a speaking machine.

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM His grandson would describe this machine as follows: His machine, or “head, pronounced the p, b, m, and the vowel a, with so great nicety as to deceive all who heard it unseen, when it pronounced the words mama, papa, map, and pam; and it had a most plaintive tone, when the lips were gradually closed.” Edgeworth also bears witness to the capacity of this speaking head. (Interestingly, while I was working for the General Electric Armament Systems Department in Burlington, Vermont in 1969, a management trainee brought in an apparatus of tubes and pistons operated by air pressure which he of course blandly claimed to have invented on his own, which could approximate human speech. His idea was that we were to put this apparatus on a bullhorn out in the warehouse, and use it to read out the part numbers and nomenclatures of parts which the warehouse workers were to collect and send to the factory. It was curious to suppose that this just-graduated-from-college trainee would have invented such a Rube Goldberg device as it was far more complex than, and far inferior in performance to, simply placing an existing telephone on an existing squawk-box. His idea of course came to nothing — but I did not think to investigate his assertion that he had invented this device all on his own.)

May 16, Saturday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s mistress Mary Parker gave birth to Susanna Parker. (He would have a total of 12 legitimate children in addition to his two illegitimate daughters that we know of, and would raise these illegitimate daughters with their siblings as equals. We should note carefully what this tells us about the England of the 19th Century: Dr. Darwin could get in a whole potfull of trouble through spreading heretical ideas, in fact practically destroying his reputation, but seemingly could get in no trouble at all through spreading his sperm around. One may wonder how such relations are reported in the biography of Erasmus by his grandson Charles Darwin. On page 26 he mentions his grandfather’s marriage in 1757 to “Miss Mary Howard, aged 17-18 years, who, judging from all that I have heard of her, must have been a superior and charming woman,” and mentions that in 1770 she “died after a long and suffering illness.” “They seem to have lived together most happily during the thirteen years of their married life, and she was tenderly nursed by her husband during her last illness.” Then on pages 30/31, with nothing of significance intervening, he mentions that in 1781, “eleven years after the death of his first wife, Dr. Darwin married the widow of Colonel ... Pole HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

of Redburn Hall. He had become acquainted with her in the spring of 1778, when she had come to Lichfield in order that he might attend her children professionally.” He nowhere cites his grandfather’s remark that “The final cause of this contest among males seems to be that the strongest and most active male should propagate the species, which should thence become improved.” One would expect, therefore, in a Victorian family biography of this sort, there to be no mention at all by the grandson of his grandfather’s long-term mistress Mary Parker, or of his own two Parker great-aunts who were the products of that union. Such an expectation is confounded, however, for Charles writes very plainly on page 64: “In the interval between his first and second marriages, Dr. Darwin became the father of two illegitimate daughters. To his credit be it said that he gave them an excellent education, and from all that I have heard they grew up to be admirable ladies, living on intimate terms with his widow and the children by the second marriage.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1774

May 20, Friday: The Administration of Justice Act. READ THE FULL TEXT

The Massachusetts Government Act. READ THE FULL TEXT

Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s mistress Mary Parker gave birth to Mary Parker. (He would have a total of 12 legitimate children in addition to his two known illegitimate daughters, and would raise these illegitimate daughters with their siblings as equals. One may wonder how such relations are reported in the biography of Erasmus by his grandson Charles Robert. On page 26 he mentions his grandfather’s marriage in 1757 to “Miss Mary Howard, aged 17-18 years, who, judging from all that I have heard of her, must have been a superior and charming woman,” and mentions that in 1770 she “died after a long and suffering illness.” “They seem to have lived together most happily during the thirteen years of their married life, and she was tenderly nursed by her husband during her last illness.” Then on pages 30/31, with nothing of significance intervening, he mentions that in 1781, “eleven years after the death of his first wife, Dr. Darwin married the widow of Colonel ... Pole of Redburn Hall. He had become acquainted with her in the spring of 1778, when she had come to Lichfield in order that he might attend her children professionally.” One would expect, therefore, in a Victorian family biography of this sort, there to be no mention at all by the grandson of his grandfather’s long-term mistress Mary Parker, or of his own two Parker great-aunts who were the products of that union. One would expect that it would be very much left to our own imaginations, to fantasize about this enormous man stuffing himself with enormous quantities of sugar –sugar is good for the health, he held– and then proceeding to swive lustily with his young mistress. —Such an expectation is confounded, however, for the grandson Charles writes very plainly on page 64: “In the interval between his first and second marriages, Dr. Darwin became the father of two illegitimate daughters. To his credit be it said that he gave them an excellent education, and from all that I have heard they grew up to be admirable ladies, living on intimate terms with his widow and the children by the second marriage.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

August 1, Monday: The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON DIFFERENT KINDS OF AIR disclosed that burning a candle in a closed container changes the quality of the atmosphere so the flame is extinguished. Animals placed in that environment quickly die. A living sprig of mint renews the air so a candle will once again burn. Today we know that the non-flammable air is carbon dioxide; growing a plant in such an environment replenishes the oxygen which is necessary to sustain life. On learning of his results, Benjamin Franklin, a correspondent of Priestley’s, would comment in a letter: “I hope this [rehabilitation of air by plants] will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening from an opinion of their being unwholesome.”5 The Reverend’s other experiments during this decade would have to do with the properties of vegetables growing in light, and the properties of water and air. Through such experiments he would conclude that water is the basis for all air. Priestley would exchange data and specimens with Claude Louis Berthollet, Joseph Banks, Richard Kirwan, Peter Woulfe, and Karl Scheele. He would discuss his work with, among others, Matthew Boulton, James Keir, James Watt, William Withering, and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, contemporaries with whom he was meeting monthly at the Soho

House in a group known as the Lunar Society. These people thought big: through their discussions of pure and applied sciences, the Society intended to transform the face of England materially, socially, and culturally. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

In Boston, the mode of government was altering in response to pressure from Great Britain, and it was anticipated that the Americans were not going to take something like this lying down: In July the “Act for the better regulation of the government of Massachusetts Bay” was received in Boston; in conformity to which the Mandamus Council and many other officers were appointed. This produced great excitement in the community and evil consequences were anticipated. The people seemed determined not to submit to an act so unconstitutional and oppressive. During this commotion an individual went secretly to Cambridge on the 1st of August, contrary to the unanimous wish of his fellow citizens, to inform some of the members of the Council, of the state of public feeling, and to put them on their guard against an attack from the people, which he thought likely to take place.6

5. This was a strange remark to be coming from Franklin, since as a person responsible for city fire control he had expressed himself in opposition to the idea of people having any trees at all on their house lots and along the sidewalks in the city of Philadelphia — trees that might carry a house fire from one structure to another, trees that belonged out in the countryside. 6. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1775

Evidently the sexual relationship of Erasmus Darwin with Mary Parker, who had borne him two illegitimate daughters, was not going well. In this year he fell in love with Mrs. Elizabeth Pole, who would become a widow in 1780,7 and we hear nothing further of Mary Parker except that in 1782 she would marry a Birmingham mechanic named Joseph Day, that in 1793 Dr. Darwin would have his son send Mrs. Day of Birmingham a pie, and that she would survive until 1820. (His grandson Charles Robert Darwin would date his meeting her to “the spring of 1778, when she had come to Lichfield in order that he might attend her children professionally.” One would expect, therefore, in a Victorian family biography of this sort, there to be no mention at all by the grandson of his grandfather’s long-term mistress Mary Parker, or of his own two Parker great-aunts who were the products of that union. Such an expectation is confounded, however, for Charles writes very plainly on page 64: “In the interval between his first and second marriages, Dr. Darwin became the father of two illegitimate daughters. To his credit be it said that he gave them an excellent education, and from all that I have heard they grew up to be admirable ladies, living on intimate terms with his widow and the children by the second marriage.”)

Early in this year, against the wishes of his father, the son Charles went off to Christ Church, Oxford. In a few years he would die due to an infected cut sustained while dissecting the brain of a dead child.

Dr. Darwin also seems to have had a relationship of some sort at the time with a poet, Miss Anna Seward “the Swan of Lichfield” (1742-1809) — and his marriage with the widow Elizabeth Pole instead of with her would cause this poet such dissatisfaction that more than three decades later, after the doctor’s death, she would publish a biography of him that is demonstrably full of falsehood and calumny. The love of woman is a very different affair from friendship, and my grandfather seems to have been capable of the most ardent love of this kind.

7. Her husband, Colonel Edward Sacheverel Pole, could only have been in rather poor shape — since during the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 he had been left for dead on the battlefield no fewer than three times. For instance, during the Battle of Minden a bullet had entered his left eye and exited through the back of his skull. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1776

Dr. Erasmus Darwin began the creation of a botanic garden at Abnalls, Lichfield. He began the keeping of a Commonplace Book, which would become massive. His eldest son, Charles, entered the Edinburgh Medical School. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1778

May 15, Thursday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s eldest son, Charles, a medical student, age 19, died of an infected wound received while dissecting the brain of a child. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1779

Dr. Erasmus Darwin constructed a machine that caused what was being written with one pen to be replicated by a second, linked pen (despite what you may have hears about Thomas Jefferson’s copy machine at Monticello, the two such devices created by Dr. Darwin remain the only ones ever constructed that were capable of producing a copy entirely indistinguishable from the original!), and an effective horizontal windmill for the grinding of flints — and sketched a multi-mirror telescope.

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM He completed his botanical garden at Abnalls, Lichfield. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1780

November 27, Monday: The husband of Mrs. Elizabeth Pole died. She and Dr. Erasmus Darwin had been in love since 1778 and would wed in 1781.

The love of woman is a very different affair from friendship, and my grandfather seems to have been capable of the most ardent love of this kind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1781

March 6, Tuesday: According to the journal of Friend Thomas B. Hazard or Hafsard or Hasard of Kingstown, Rhode Island,8 “General Washington went to Newport this day. The town was illuminated.” Presumably Washington and his escort of 20 soldiers had arrived over the old Pequot trail out of Connecticut and had crossed over to Newport on the ferry.

People were trying to kill each other at Wetzell’s or Whitsall’s Mills and at Wiboo Swamp in South Carolina. (I wish they’d learn to stop doing that.)

In England, Erasmus Darwin and the widowed Elizabeth Pole were wed. She was wealthy, so during this month they would move from Lichfield to her grand home, Radburn Hall near Derby.

This of course meant that Dr. Darwin would no longer be able to attend the monthly meetings of the Lunar Society at the Soho House in Birmingham — that his future contacts with these friends would be through correspondence. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

8. He was a blacksmith and sometimes rode to Quaker meeting with his wife on the same horse — and sometimes she would fall off but “not hurt herself much.” He was called “Nailer Tom” because of the nails he trimmed from scrap iron, and in order to distinguish him from a relative known as “College Tom,” from another relative known as “Shepherd Tom,” and from his own son who –because he had fits– was known as “Pistol-Head Tom.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1782

January 31, Thursday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s son Edward was born.

October 17, Thursday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin wrote to sympathizing with the American colonies in their revolt: “I hope Dr. Franklin will live to see peace, to see America recline under her own vine and fig-tree, turning her swords into plough-shares.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1783

Dr. Erasmus Darwin was translating Linnaeus’s influential SYSTEMA VEGETABILIUM, the system of plant classification that forms the basis of modern botany, from Latin into English.

March: Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who was missing his monthly meetings at the Soho House with the Lunaticks of Birmingham,

participated in the founding of a new philosophical (that is, scientific) society in Derby, to replace an earlier one there that had there collapsed. Since the first meeting of this society was at his house, it appear probable that he played a principal role.

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

April 23, Wednesday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Violetta was born.

British general Sir Guy Carleton requested Congress’s aid in evacuating New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

July 11, Friday: For some time during the first half of July in this summer, the heat in the English midlands had been stifling –in fact the hottest ever recorded– as a sultry haze enveloped everything. The sun was seen as blood red, and even at midday was casting a red glow. On this day the wife of Matthew Boulton, Anne, was found floating face down in a pool at Soho, apparently a victim of heat stroke. —Although the cause of this weather event would not until later be ascertained, there had been a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland.9

October: Dr. Erasmus Darwin moved from Radburn Hall near Derby to a house on Full Street in that town. There he had an artesian well drilled.

He had a clear understanding of the principle by which such artesian wells operated, as in a paper he wrote that “some of the more interior strata of the earth are exposed naked on the tops of mountains; and ... those strata which lie uppermost, or nearest to the summit of the mountains, are the lowest in the contiguous plains.” Waters “sliding between two of the strata above described, descend till they find or make for themselves an outlet and will in consequence rise to a level with the parts of the mountain where they originated.”

Dr. Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert would write, “He was much in advance of his age in his ideas as to sanitary arrangements — such as supplying towns with pure water, having holes made into crowded sitting and bed-rooms for the constant admission of fresh air, and not allowing chimneys to be closed during summer.” THE SCIENCE OF 1783

9. Benjamin Franklin, noticing what he termed a “dry fog” interfering with the rays of the sun, may very well have been the first person who would think to connect such weather phenomena with volcanic eruptions. The eruptions were of Iwaki crater on the island of Honshu in Japan in December 1782, and of Asama Yama on the island of Honshu in Japan and Skaptar Jökul in Iceland during 1783. Soufrière on St. Vincent would blow in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines would blow in 1814, but these would become almost as pop-tarts popping up in a toaster when Tambora in Indonesia would blow in 1816, as this would be by far the most powerful volcanic blast of the past 10,000 years. All but 26 of the 12,000 Sumbawa islanders would lose their lives. We would have a mild taste of this volcano weather, in our own lives, in the series of cool summers after 1991 when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines would blow its top — remember? HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

December 26, Friday: At a Philosophical Society event in Derby (Soho House of the Lunar Society in Birmingham no longer being available to him due to distance),

Dr. Erasmus Darwin released a 5-foot balloon of hydrogen gas and it traveled 30 miles.

This was a first in England. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1784

August 24, Tuesday: In England, Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Emma was born.

In Bedford, New Hampshire, Joseph Emerson Worcester was born. Neither he nor any of his 13 siblings would be permitted to leave home to begin their formal education until the date of their 21st birthdays. All but one of these 14, including Joe, would become teachers. Joseph would rise to fame as a lexicographer but, unlike his competitor Noah Webster, Jr., would be disinclined to sacrifice the tradition and elegance of language to anything so mundane as usage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1785

Publication of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s translation of Linnaeus’s SYSTEMA VEGETABILIUM, the system of plant classification that forms the basis of modern Botany, from Latin into English as SYSTEM OF VEGETABLES. His paper “An artificial spring of water” appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

THE SCIENCE OF 1785

The Reverend Manasseh Cutler, LL.D. was aspiring to write a natural history of New England. In this year he presented a paper on “Vegetable Productions” which is credited with being the 1st treatise on New England Botany. Lamenting that Canada and the southern states have been visited by “eminent botanists from Europe,” while the part in between “seems still to remain unexplored,” He blamed this sorry condition on the fact that botany was not being taught in our colleges — due to “the mistaken opinion of its unutility in common life.”10

10. Reverend Manasseh Cutler, “An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions, Naturally Growing in this Part of America, Botanically Arranged.” MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, 1st series, Volume I (Boston 1785): 396- 493. REV. MANASSEH CUTLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1786

June 17, Saturday: Opening of the bridge thrown across the Charles River (Quinobequin) between Boston and Charlestown MA/Cambridge. (It would have been such a convenience for the British Army in April 1775! There would be for some time only this one considerable river along the entire coastline of the United States of America that would have a bridge across it. Every other stream along the Eastern Seaboard still would for the time being have to be forded, if possible, or alternatively crossed by a ferry.)

Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s son Francis was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1787

September 5, Wednesday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s son John was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1788

Erasmus Darwin’s paper “Mechanical expansion of air” appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon died. He had been succeeded in his post at the Jardin du Roi by the Count de Lacepede, who did research on electricity and in this year published THE NATURAL HISTORY OF OVIPAROUS QUADRUPEDS AND SERPENTS.

Thomas Walter’s FLORA CAROLINIANA was published. THE SCIENCE OF 1788 BOTANIZING

The Linnaean Society was established in London, its first president being the James Edward Smith (1759- 1828) who, with Sir Joseph Banks’s (1743-1820) encouragement, had in 1784 purchased Carl von Linné’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

library and herbarium.

CAROLUS LINNAEUS

President Smith would champion the Linnaean system for the next half century even after it had outlived its usefulness. Robert Brown (1773-1858) and John Lindley (1799-1865) would lead the opposition to this retro- thinking. In France, the changes in social values brought about by the Revolution of 1789 coincided with the acceptance of a natural system of classification: Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748-1836), nephew of Bernard de Jussieu and friend of Linné, in 1789 in his GENERA PLANTARUM... (Paris), would arrange the genera of the world’s plants into 100 families (ordines naturales) based on concepts developed by his uncle Bernard, in a continuation of the ideas proposed a generation before by Michel Adanson (1727-1806) in FAMILLES DES PLANTES (2 vols., Paris, 1763[-1764]). As had Pierre Magnol (1638-1715), Sloane’s professor, long before him, Adanson believed that plants could be arranged into natural families and genera in a classification scheme free of a priori weighting and metaphysical themes, based solely upon empirical observation of similarities and dissimilarities.

Jean Senebier, in his EXPÉRIENCES SUR L’ACTION DE LA LUMIÈRE SOLAIRE DANS LA VÉGÉTATION established the relationship between the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the production of oxygen by plants. His studies built on the work of Ingenhousz. PLANTS

According to Charles Corn’s THE SCENTS OF EDEN: A HISTORY OF THE SPICE TRADE (NY: Kodansha America, 1999), pages 243-4: [O]n a spring morning in 1788, the one-hundred-ton Cadet, built at Pembroke on the North River, glided down Salem’s harbor “bound for Madeira and from thence to India and the China Seas: Prosperous be her voyage,” according to the Salem Mercury of April 15. The daily newspaper celebrated the small brig’s leave- taking as it did that of most ships, because in Salem her being fitted out for parts unknown was the sort of pulsating news upon which the port thrived during the heady days after the Revolution. The Cadet, once owned by Derby, now belonged to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

same William Vans who had sailed with Ebenezer West to Canton in 1785. Vans was aboard again as supercargo, while the brig was commanded by Vans’s brother-in-law Jonathan Carnes, who was thirty years old. A month later the Cadet made Madeira, and then she suddenly disappeared, presumably somewhere in Eastern seas — the Indian Ocean or perhaps beyond. Not one of the other half dozen Salem ships in that part of the world could account for her whereabouts. Then, on May 18, 1790, more than two years later, the Salem Gazette finally reported, “Captain Carnes, absent on an India voyage upwards of two years, was at the Cape of Good Hope, February 14, 1790, and was to sail in a few days for the W. Indies.” But where Carnes’s voyage had taken him remained a mystery. That he had sailed thirteen thousand miles to unknown Sumatra was this young captain’s secret.... There are conflicting stories as to what happened next, for there is no surviving log. Nor are there letters home from crew members, and the Salem papers do not mention the Cadet’s return, an unusual omission. With the paucity of records, one can only speculate on the fate of the Cadet, which remains largely a mystery. Carnes most certainly left the Cape with a fully laden ship to ride an easterly wind back across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean. A likely explanation, though it is by no means conclusive, is that the brig and her cargo were lost on a reef in the West Indies. We know only that somehow Carnes found his way back to Salem with tales of the strangest race of people he had ever seen. But most important, he returned with a profoundly rich secret: the opening of a new channel of trade in pepper, which, to say the least, was arcane cargo in this brash new nation. SPICE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1789

April: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s THE LOVES OF THE PLANTS was published. (This is Part II of THE BOTANIC GARDEN.)

In the course of this poem Dr. Darwin had occasion to express his distress at the thought of slavery. Anyone who tolerates human enslavement is approximately as guilty as is the slavemaster himself: Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort, Inexorable CONSCIENCE holds his court; With still small voice the plots of Guilt alarms. Bares his mask’d brow, his lifted hand disarms; But wrapp’d in might with terrors all his own, He speaks in thunder, when the deed is done. Hear him, ye Senates! hear this truth sublime, He, who allows oppression, shares the crime.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797) who was being referred to in England as their “Prime Minister of Taste,” would think highly of this literary effort.

During this month Dr. Darwin was advised that in Birmingham, England, muzzles or gags were being presently manufactured “for the slaves in our islands.” He began to scheme as to how this might be turned against the advocates of human slavery: If this be true, and such an instrument could be exhibited by a speaker in the House of Commons, it might have a great effect ... an instrument of torture of our own manufacture.... THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM When his grandson Charles Robert Darwin would write his biography, he would observe that: Notwithstanding the former high estimation of his poetry by men of all kinds in England, no one of the present generation reads, as it appears, a single line of it. So complete a reversal of judgment within a few years is a remarkable phenomenon ... the downfall of his fame as a poet was chiefly caused by the publication of the well-known parody the “Loves of the Triangles.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1790

The Birmingham Lunar Society, an informal group of 14 meeting monthly at the Soho House, had been

instrumental in discovering practical applications for the more abstract science carried on in the 18th Century. The group –including Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, the Reverend Joseph Priestley, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and James Watt– had been meeting monthly on the Monday night nearest the full moon, for some two decades. By this point, however, Dr. Darwin for instance having moved away from the vicinity of Birmingham due to his new marriage –and the group being forced to endure a considerable degree of political suspicion– it had disbanded. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

July 5, Monday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Harriot was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1791

When Dr. Luigi Galvani presented his paper “De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius” (“Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion”), Dr. Erasmus Darwin pointed to this experimentation on the contraction of muscle tissue, and its subsequent confirmation by Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), to argue that the impulses traveling along a nerve –and hence, even thinking– had a non-spiritual, physical component — in that they were a function of a non-spiritual, physical entity, to wit, electricity. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

(This would prove to be, if anything, for the society of his time, at least as unsettling as, later, his grandson’s theory in biology.) THE SCIENCE OF 1791 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1792

May: Dr. Erasmus Darwin sympathized with the French Revolution, hoping that despite the current disasters freedom would flourish in France, and that it would come to be prosperous and a great example to surrounding nations.

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company was formed to create a network of artificial works and natural waterway improvements connecting the Mohawk River port at Schenectady with the Great Lakes harbor at Oswego.

June: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s THE ECONOMY OF VEGETATION was published (this is Part I of THE BOTANIC GARDEN) and caused him to be recognized by many as England’s greatest living poet.

THE SCIENCE OF 1792

Nevertheless, when his grandson Charles Robert would write his biography, he would observe that: Notwithstanding the former high estimation of his poetry by men of all kinds in England, no one of the present generation reads, as it appears, a single line of it. So complete a reversal of judgment within a few years is a remarkable phenomenon ... the downfall of his fame as a poet was chiefly caused by the publication of the well-known parody the “Loves of the Triangles.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1793

Dr. Erasmus Darwin had Joseph Wright paint his portrait again.

As before, his deep small pox pits were omitted from the portrait.11

In this year he had one of his sons send a pie to a Mrs. Day. (She was Mary Parker, his former mistress, the mother of his two illegitimate daughters, who was at this time married to a mechanic of Birmingham.)

Christian Sprengel was the first researcher to publish detailed descriptions of the manner in which different flowers are pollinated. He made the original drawings himself. Sprengel’s discoveries would be ignored by botanists until Charles Darwin. PLANTS

11. Dr. Darwin\’s grandson Charles Darwin would be assured, by relatives who had known his grandfather in his obese old age, that by the time of his death these pits had to a remarkable degree smoothed themselves out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

December: Dr. Erasmus Darwin faced trial for seditious libel in regard to an “ADDRESS” of the Derby Society for Political Information to their fellow citizens of which, actually, he had not been the author.

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM http://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/wmward/Digi%20html/dspi1.html

This had been written by William Ward after a meeting of the Society held at the Talbot Inn, Irongate, Derby, on July 16, 1792. Almost certainly it had been printed at the Derby Mercury. It had been picked up by a London newspaper the printer of which was being sued for sedition at Kings Bench Court. The case was defended by Thomas Erskine, a M.P. for Portsmouth, whose “Plan B” in the courtroom was to suggest, albeit incorrectly, that perhaps it had been written instead by Dr. Darwin. This defense of William Ward would prove successful, and then there would be no further proceedings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1794

May: Volume I of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s ZOONOMIA, a medical textbook punctuated with the author’s reflections on philosophy, natural history, and human life, was published (in this, Chapter 39 was an open espousal of the fact of biological evolution, in that he had all life as arising from “one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality”).12

THE SCIENCE OF 1794

12. Although Dr. Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert would read ZOONOMIA at the age of 16 or 17, he would report later in life that the poem had been without effect on his mind. He hadn’t even retained a memory of what his family’s motto E conchis omnia was, or what it signified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

This poem would be honored (and advertised) by the Pope by being placed on the INDEX EXPURGATORIUS. This must not be read by any faithful Catholic! It would appear in many editions, including three Irish editions and four American editions, and in addition would be widely translated into other languages. Its author would brag that it made him one hell of a lot of money! Some birds have acquired harder beaks to crack nuts, as the parrot. Others have acquired beaks adapted to break the harder seeds, as sparrows. Others for the softer seeds of flowers, or the buds of trees as the finches. Other birds have acquired long beaks to penetrate the moister soils in search of roots, as woodcocks; and others broad ones to filtrate the water of lakes, and to retain aquatic insects. All of which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavour of the creatures to supply the want of food. When his grandson Charles Robert Darwin would write his biography, he would observe that: The “Zoonomia” is largely devoted to medicine, and my father thought that it had much influenced medical practice in England; he was of course a partial, yt naturally a more observant judge than others on this point. The book when published was extensively read by the medical men of the day, and the author was highly esteemed by them as a practitioner. Well, you may inquire, if Dr. Darwin had the idea that life forms had evolved, then why isn’t he the one whom we recognize as the creator of the theory of evolution, rather than his grandson Charles? The simple answer is that all Erasmus had going for him was the power of poetry. He didn’t got no proof. Even when his grandson Charles Darwin read this poem in his youth, he wasn’t much impressed. Erasmus hadn’t been able to suggest a mechanism which would make this idea that life forms had evolved and were continuing to evolve into an idea that possessed scientific necessity. It would be left for his grandson Charles actually to dope out the nature of this mechanism, and provide this proof.

Not that being supplied with scientific proof is always enough! Professor Louis Agassiz, for instance, at Harvard College, twenty miles as the crow flies from Henry Thoreau, would be forced to choose between Darwin’s proof and his own ingrained belief in the natural rightness of human slavery — and so of course this Harvard man would close his eyes to the scientific proof and insist upon his embrace of the natural rightness of human slavery. You can just look at these blacks and know that they are separate from us, and inferior to us. (And his buddy Waldo Emerson, having his minor children being educated by Agassiz, would exhibit the same “Negrophobia.”)

Note that Dr. Darwin was first with the theory that the moon originated in being split apart from the earth. He has clear priority over his grandson who usually gets all the credit for origination of this hypothesis. Gnomes! how you shriek’d! when through the troubled air Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war; HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

When rose the continents, and sunk the main, And Earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.— Gnomes! how you gazed! when from her wounded side Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car, Circling the solar orb, a sister star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss’d, And roll’d round Earth her airless realms of frost. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

(How interestingly different this is, from the idea that Erasmus Darwin, because he knew about the fact of evolution, should take priority over his grandson Charles Darwin in regard to the theory of evolution! The difference is caused by the fact that in the case of the origination of the earth’s moon, there is no distinction to be made between the hypothesis that it split off from the earth, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a theory as to how it could have and how it inevitably needed to split off from the earth.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1796

Volum e II o f Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s ZOONOMIA was published (this would cause him to be regarded as a leading medical writer).13

THE SCIENCE OF 1796

13. Although Dr. Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert Darwin would read ZOONOMIA at the age of 16 or 17, he would report later in life that the poem had been without effect on his mind. He hadn’t even retained a memory of what his family’s motto E conchis omnia was, or what it signified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

January 24, Sunday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin had a long talk with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Derby. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1797

Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s FEMALE EDUCATION IN BOARDING SCHOOLS was published (his daughters Susanna Parker and Mary Parker by his mistress Mary Parker had begun their girls’ boarding school at Ashbourne in 1794).

At Elston Hall, Dr. Darwin’s widowed mother Elizabeth Hill Darwin died at the age of 94. The son would say: “a better mother never existed.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1798

A new magazine was created in England, that tight little island, the Anti-Jacobin, to raise the spirits of the islanders as they were locked in their deadly total struggle with the French — a struggle which was not going well. George Canning, who would later become Prime Minister, was placed in charge of this important new magazine. Soon he would be locked in mortal scriptorial combat with one of England’s primary internal enemies, the preposterous Dr. Erasmus Darwin formerly of the Birmingham Lunaticks.

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

In LYRICAL BALLADS, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge criticized Dr/ Erasmus Darwin. However, Wordsworth cited him as a source for “Goody Blake and Harry Gill.”

Thomas Brown criticized Dr. Darwin’s 1794 Zoonomia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

April/May: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s THE LOVES OF THE PLANTS, which had been published in 1789, was savaged by the English establishment in LOVES OF THE TRIANGLES, a 294-line poem. The anonymous dissing piece had been authored, actually, by George Canning (1770-1827), Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Pitt government and a future Prime Minister.

This was, in that era in England, a dangerous thing. England was fighting Napoleon Bonaparte, and in horror of the French disease and of French Jacobism — and thus any Englishman who embraced heretical ideas could be accused of being a free-thinker, and embracing his nation’s enemies. In the rough-and-tumble game of tag that was merry old England, Erasmus had become “it,” he had the cooties, he had the donkey’s tail pinned to his ass. This would be the blow from which this man’s public reputation might never recover. THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

The future prime minister had found four of Erasmus’s hot ideas particularly ridiculous: the preposterous notion that human beings could have evolved out of lower forms of existence, the heresy that mountains actually are quite a bit more antique than the 6,000 years that current interpretations of GENESIS allowed to them, the idea that electricity might prove to have important practical applications — and an incautious prediction that there would come to be powered aircraft, and that such devices were to become a tool of warfare:

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer’d Steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1799

December 29, Sunday: Because the French closed the port of Genoa, Antonio Paganini found himself without work and relocated to the port city of Livorno — taking his son Nicolò with him.

Across the new American nation, sermons on this Sunday morning consisted of commemorations of founding father George Washington (those that succeeded in being the most grandly fulsome would be published). For instance, the Reverend John T. Kirkland, minister of the New South Church in Boston and eventual president of Harvard College (that is, until forced to resign), orated:

The virtues of our departed friend were crowned by piety. He is known to have been habitually devout. To Christian institutions he gave the countenance of his example; and no one could express, more fully, his sense of the Providence of God, and the dependence of man. “When I contemplate” said he “the interposition of Providence as it was visibly manifested in guiding us through the revolution, in preparing us for the reception of a general government, and in conciliating the good will of the people of America to one another after its adoption – I feel myself oppressed and almost overwhelmed with a sense of the divine munificence: I feel that nothing is due to my personal agency HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

in all these complicated and wonderful events, except what can simply be attributed to the exertions of an honest zeal for the good of my country.”

Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s namesake son Erasmus Darwin drowned himself (or so it seemed) in the River Derwent at the foot of his garden at the age of 40. When Dr. Darwin saw the corpse he asked his other children not to view it. Mrs Darwin and I intend to lie in Breadsal church by his side. Charles Robert Darwin would observe that prior to the suicide there had been some behavioral changes, such as indecision and lethargy, indicative of a temporary insanity: The immediate cause of his death was the attempt to settle some accounts. His confidential clerk told one of Dr. Darwin’s stepsons that Mr. Darwin had been working for two nights, and when urged in the evening of December 29th to take some rest and food, he answered with a most distressed expression, holding his head, “I cannot, for I promised if I’m alive that the accounts should be sent in to-morrow.” Early in the night of the same day he could bear his misery no longer, and seems to have rushed out of the house and, leaving his hat on the bank, to have thrown himself into the water. He was probably conscious of some mental change, for he purchased, six weeks before his death, some land near Lincoln, and the small estate of the Priory, near Derby; and he intended, at the early age of forty, to retire from business, so as to spend the rest of his days in quiet; or, as my grandfather, who could not have foreseen what all this foreboded, expressed it (in a letter to my father, November 28th, 1799), “to sleep away the remainder of his life.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1800

April: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s PHYTOLOGIA: OR THE PHILOSOPHY OF AGRICULTURE AND GARDENING declared that leaves breathe air through tiny pores, that sugar and starch are the products of plant “digestion,” and that nitrates and phosphorus promote vegetation.

THE SCIENCE OF 1800

Dr. Darwin had performed what we might regard as the rather obvious experiment of coating leaves with oil and had done some reasoning as to why this caused the plants to wither away. In this poem he declared that the plants must be inspiring air through tiny pores in their leaves (predicting the later discovery of microscopic stomata), that the sugars and starches these plants create and store in their bodies must be the products of some sort of plant “digestion,” and that nitrates and phosphorus will promote their growth. But not only that: this book offered its author, at one point, an opportunity to fulminate against human enslavement — and so he seized upon that opportunity: In many plants, sugar is found ready prepared ... and in the SWEETS sugar-cane it abounds.... Great God of Justice! grant that it WITHOUT may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may SLAVERY thence give happiness to the labourer, as well as to the merchant and consumer. Samuel Taylor Coleridge would coin the term “darwinizing,” meaning to speculate wildly, in reference to the ideas of Erasmus Darwin.

During this year Dr. Darwin made a new machine to copy handwriting, similar to the machine he had constructed for himself in 1779, for the use of his small son Charles Robert.

The good doctor enjoyed studying the cultivation of plants in part because he enjoyed food. He enjoyed it so much that as he grew older and stouter, he had a semi-circle cut in the side of his dining-table so he could be more intimate with his meal.14

14. An apparatus remarkably similar to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s famous revolving circular bed at the original Penthouse in Chicago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1802

April 18, Easter Sunday: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s final volume of poetry, THE TEMPLE OF NATURE; OR, THE ORIGIN OF SOCIETY, would need to be published posthumously. At Breadsall Priory, north of Derby, England, the doctor, age 70 and very corpulent, with a lung infection, had a violent shivering fit at 7AM and went to the kitchen to warm himself at the fire. While thus attempting to warm himself he observed a maid churning his butter — and so he instructed her that she not perform such labors on any Sunday. He then collapsed, refusing a suggestion that Mrs. Darwin be sent for, and was put in an armchair. Although a servant would allege that just before he died, a little before 9AM, he faintly whispered the name “Jesus,” his grandson Charles Robert Darwin would dismiss that report as obviously due to wishful thinking.

His widow would preserve that armchair in that place for many years.

Breadsall Priory is now a hotel. You may visit there the grave of Dr. Darwin’s horse, who was named “Doctor.”

The grandson would describe his grandfather as having been no atheist, but as having been of a more moral than theological cast of mind, and quote his TEMPLE OF NATURE in proof of this: [T]he sacred maxims of the author of Christianity, “Do as you would be done by,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself,” include all our duties of benevolence and morality; and, if sincerely obeyed by all nations, would a thousandfold multiply the present happiness of mankind. Many years after his death, the anonymous author of a guidebook to Derbyshire would plainly hint –without offering any detail or evidence– that Dr. Darwin had been a murderer. He was opposed to any restraint of the insane, excepting as far as was absolutely necessary. He strongly advised a tender system of education. With his prophetic spirit, he anticipated many new and now admitted scientific truths, as well as some mechanical inventions. He seems to have been the first man who urged the use of phosphate of lime in agriculture, which has proved of such great importance to the country. He was highly benevolent, and retained the friendship of many distinguished men during his whole life. He strongly insisted on humanity to the lower animals. He earnestly admired philanthropy, and abhorred slavery. But he was unorthodox; and as soon as the grave closed over him he was grossly and often calumniated. Such was the state of Christian feeling in this country at the beginning of the present century; we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails.

April 24, Saturday: The body of Erasmus Darwin was interred at Breadsall Church, north of Derby, England. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1803

15 Erasmus Darwin’s THE TEMPLE OF NATURE; OR, THE ORIGIN OF SOCIETY.

’Ere Time began, from flaming chaos hurled Rose the bright spheres, which from the circling world; Earths from each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issued from the first. Then whilst the sea at their coeval birth Surge over surge involved the shoreless earth; Nursed by warm sun-beams in primeval caves Organic life began beneath the waves..... Hence without parent by spontaneous birth Rise the first specks of animated earth; From nature’s womb the plant or insect swims, And buds or breathes with microscopic limbs. Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves First forms minute unseen by sphearic glass Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; whence countless groups of vegetation spring And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Summer: In order to disprove Erasmus Darwin’s ideas about spontaneous generation, the Reverend Joseph Priestley experimented with the growth of algae. He also contested Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, thinking that plants and animals could arise only from pre-existing germs of the same matter. Priestley’s beliefs that various kinds of animal and vegetable matter not visible to the naked eye floated in the atmosphere were later validated by Pasteur. Among Priestley’s most influential friends and colleagues in America were Benjamin Rush, Thomas Cooper, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

15. The frontispiece from Erasmus Darwin’s THE TEMPLE OF NATURE (depicted on a following screen) was drawn by Henry Fuseli to indicate the goddess of poetry pulling aside the veil of the Artemis of Ephesus, goddess of wild nature whose statues were being presumed incorrectly at that time to have been many-breasted. According to Frazer’s THE GOLDEN BOUGH –one of those magisterial ISIS works out of the dark ages of scholarship upon which we rely far to much– “I am the Mother without spouse, the Original Mother; all are my children, and therefore none has ever dared to approach me.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1805

Oliver Evans of Philadelphia, “the James Watt of America,” opened the doors of his work shed and drove his amphibious vehicle, which he termed the Orukter Amphibolos, a few blocks to the City Hall. After displaying the vehicle there for several days (shown here as drawn by T. West), he drove it down to the banks of the

Schuylkill River, moved its drive belt from its wheels to its paddle wheel, and ventured out upon the waters. After steaming around the southern tip of Philadelphia, he steamed some 16 miles up the Delaware River against the current, before returning his vehicle to the dock and then to his work shed near the city hall. This year 1805 then would be marked as the year of the first self-propelled vehicle in America.16

16. Well, but this was merely the 1st such demonstration in the New World, not in the entire world. Such a demonstration had already taken place 22 years earlier, the inventor being Claude-François-Dorothée, marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, the vehicle the Pyroscaphe, and the river the Saône. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1812

The Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier’s RECHERCHES SUR LES OSSEMENTS FOSSILES DE QUADRUPÈDES correctly identified pterosaurs as flying reptiles. (His conclusions would of course for many years be largely ignored.)

PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1816

June 23, Sunday morning: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft had had a “waking” nightmare: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life ... His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away ... hope that ... this thing ... would subside into dead matter ... he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

She scribbled a promising 1st draft of some lines: It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half- extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room....

She would originate a story about a monster created out of dead bodies and Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s life fluid of electricity, by a fictitious Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The lines scribbled this morning would become what now HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

opens Chapter IV of FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.17

George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley began a boat tour of the lake.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal 1st day 23rd of 6th M 1816 / In our forenoon meeting James Halleck was largely & pertinently concerned in testimony - Dorothy Golding was short & pretty clever. - In the Afternoon 17. Laura Dassow Walls has inquired rhetorically, “Is it necessary to remark that Mary Shelly’s FRANKENSTEIN is still the paradigmatic myth of romantic science, right down to ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ Michael Crichton’s JURASSIC PARK, and the dystopias of cyberpunk?” — but as we shall see, this misappreciates our 20th-Century horror movies to have been accurate renditions of the Shelley romance, something which they simply are not. Shelley’s tale was not at all similar to the popular “Jurassic Park” with its focus upon hubristic science and the wrongfulness of others, but to the contrary was very similar to the unpopular “Elephant Man” with its focus upon our personal, instinctual, and very very wrong revulsion at the sight of human deformity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

John Halleck was long & I thought his testimony was pretty sound & attended with a degree of life — I believe him to be an honest friend. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

(In this year Erasmus Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert Darwin had reached at the age of seven years — and his portrait was painted.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1818

March 11, Wednesday: Sarah Elizabeth Shattuck was born in Concord, 2d child of Daniel Shattuck and Betsey Miles Shattuck.

Official date of publication18 of the story by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley about the birth of a monster out of dead bodies with the help of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s electricity, FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, with a preface ostensibly authored by the author but, for some reason, actually written for her by her spouse Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment.”

This husbandly evaluation was accurate. You should notice that there is simply no “antiscientism” to be found

18. Actually, copies of her book had begun selling in December of the previous year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

in this romance which might have given a 19th-Century person such as Henry Thoreau pause.

The antiscientism with which we are so familiar actually is all stuff which Hollywood has imported into the tale during the 20th Century! The 1931 originary movie would begin with an anonymous authoritative lecturer setting the scene by informing us that we are to learn of “a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.” This movie’s 1935 sequel “Bride of Frankenstein” would be even more explicit, in presenting an actress portraying the author engaged in conversation with Mr. Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, going: “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.”

But where had the real Mary Shelley ever expressed such an attitude? In fact she had placed in Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s mouth, as his dying words, the hope that although he had failed in his scientific objective to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,” there was still room for hope as HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

“another may succeed.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1825

Professor William Jackson Hooker’s CATALOGUE OF PLANTS IN THE GLASGOW BOTANIC GARDEN.

John Halkett, Esq.’s HISTORICAL NOTES RESPECTING THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA: WITH REMARKS ON THE ATTEMPTS MADE TO CONVERT AND CIVILIZE THEM (London: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. Edinburgh; and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. 90, Cheapside, and 8, Pall Mall).

RESPECTING THE INDIANS In this year, or in the following one, Charles Darwin would be reading his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s ZOONOMIA:

Charles Darwin read ZOONOMIA when he was sixteen or seventeen, and also listened to a panegyric in praise of evolution from his friend Dr Robert Grant at Edinburgh University. “At this time I greatly admired the ZOONOMIA,” he says. But neither Grant nor ZOONOMIA had “any effect on my mind.” This is true: otherwise he would have become an evolutionist before going on the voyage of the Beagle, rather than after.

The biographer Desmond King-Hele, who wrote the above, seems to me not to comprehend why it is that we assign authorship of the theory of evolution to the grandson, Charles, rather than to the grandfather, Erasmus. Therefore, perhaps, I should here explicate why it was that the early reading of ZOONOMIA, with its recognition of evolution, did nothing to help Charles: it is one thing to regard evolution as a fact, and another thing entirely to create a theory which accounts for it by hypothesizing a plausible mechanism and demonstrating the inevitability of this mechanism. Lots of people regarded evolution as a fact, before Charles created his theory. Almost as many people had been perfectly well aware of evolution as a fact in 1770, as had been perfectly well aware in 1491 that the earth was a globe — before Columbus obtained funding to sail west from Spain!

The first steam-locomotive railway was opened, between Stockton and Darlington in England, and George Stephenson’s Locomotion, the world’s first practically moveable steam engine for use on rails, managed to get a train of 29 little 4-wheeled carts up to a sustained speed of 8 mph.

David Douglas set out to explore the Columbia River area in British Columbia, with the cooperation of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Hudson Bay Company.

By mid-February he was off the coast of Oregon, setting ashore at Fort Vancouver. When he had gone 90 miles up that river, he began to have eye trouble due to the blown sand as well as due to the brilliance of the snow under the bright sun. He found Pinus lambertiana, which is almost as large as the giant redwoods, and fired his gun to knock some cones off the top of one. This turned out to be a serious mistake, as eight hostile Indians were alerted by the sound of gunfire. Douglas managed to elude them and would still be alive to return to England in 1827. (In 1829 he would return to the Pacific Northwest, collecting all the way from California to Alaska. He would die in Hawaii, while collecting, by falling into a pit trap in which a wild bull had already become ensnared. Douglas would introduce over 200 species to cultivation in Great Britain, including not only the Douglas fir but also the sugar pine, the noble fir, and the giant fir. BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1839

Charles Darwin was seeing through the presses his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES ... DURING THE VOYAGE OF HMS BEAGLE19about, among other things, his 1835 visit to the Galápagos.

From this year until 1841, he would be publishing five separate volumes about his trip aboard HMS Beagle.

He began by dedicating his effort to Charles Lyell, the successive volumes of whose THE PRINCIPLES OF 19. Henry Thoreau would not read this until 1846. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION (London) had kept him so very preoccupied during his long days at sea: When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.

During this year he published the 3rd volume in the series NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE, BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836. This established his further reputation as a scientist and author.

This was the year in which Charles Darwin himself alleged that he had first clearly formulated his theory of development with modification. Extremely reluctant to engage in controversy after what had happened to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, he would wait until he had amassed an enormous amount of documentation and until his theory was at risk of being sketched out by others before he would publish. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

We know that as of this year, Charles Darwin was unaware of his family motto E conchis omnia or of what it meant.

In the following year this new author would have his obligatory authorial portrait prepared:

Robert FitzRoy published two volumes of NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836, DESCRIBING THEIR EXAMINATION OF THE SOUTHERN SHORES OF SOUTH AMERICA, AND THE BEAGLE’S CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), son of Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker, had met Darwin in 1834 and in a few years they had become friends. In this year he received his MD degree from the University of Glasgow and sailed to the Antarctic in the HMS Erebus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1854

April 27, Thursday: Waldo Emerson had offered to read a paper in Moncure Daniel Conway’s room at Harvard Divinity School, and Conway had sent out invitations. The authorities had been perplexed for some time at this student’s closeness to the heretic of Concord, and when this latest thing came to their attention, they went into a panic of sorts. Conway would be challenged by Harvard’s Professor of Christian Morals with the possibility that this represented a “decline of Christian morals” in Divinity Hall. Two of the professors would visit student Conway in his room and give voice to their fears that there was being organized “a school within the school,” amounting to an “Emersonian cult.” But the meeting in question, on this date, had in fact gone off without incident, the group having moved because of its size to a public room and Emerson having merely read his paper on “Poetry” to an audience that included Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and faculty spouse Fanny Appleton Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Arthur Hugh Clough. We are left wondering why on earth all these authority figures were getting so exercised.20

Meanwhile, out at Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau was hypothesizing that the level of water in the pond ought to become very low again during the period 1866-1869 (amazingly, this anticipation would prove to have been accurate).

April 27. 7 A.M. –To Cliffs. ... The wood thrush [Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus] afar, –so superior a strain to that of other birds. I was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. I did not believe there could be such differences. This is the gospel according to the wood thrush. He makes a sabbath out of a week-day — I could go to hear him—could buy a pew in his church— Did he ever practice pulpit eloquence? He is right about the slavery question— ... Forbes says that the guides who crossed the alps with him lost the skin of their faces — (Ap from the reflections from the snow.) It is remarkable that the rise & fall of Walden though unsteady & whether periodical or merely occasional are not completed but after many years. I have observed one rise & part of 2 falls. It attains its maximum slowly & surely though unsteadily. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, requires many years for its accomplishment — and I expect that a dozen or 15 years hence it will again be as low as I have ever known it.

20. It wasn’t the fact that Waldo Emerson talked about “arrested and progressive development” in this paper on poetry which had gotten the faculty all excited, even though later it would be proposed, by some folks who demonstrably knew nothing whatever of evolutionary theory, that Emerson had here been anticipating Charles Darwin’s theory. What Emerson had said was simply “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which is not , but the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being, all of which amounted to the wanna-believe bullshit that Charles Darwin would be struggling to supersede. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1883

February 9, Friday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway addressed the Royal Institution in London on “Emerson and his Views of Nature.” He attempted to advise this competent audience that on April 27, 1854 , Waldo Emerson had delivered a talk on poetry in a public room at the Harvard Theological School, at Conway’s request, in which Emerson had spoken of arrested and progressive development in a manner which quite anticipated the 1859 theory of Mr. Charles Darwin’s . Darwin, it seems, wasn’t simply mistaken, as Professor Louis Agassiz had been waxing apoplectic at the time and as he died still insisting, but simply hadn’t been original — it had been Agassiz’s buddy Emerson who had been the original, he had known it all along, while the good professor of biology simply hadn’t noticed this wonderful thing about his buddy!

“What does this prove...?” “This is truly monstrous!”

What Emerson had said about the primary theoretical framework of the science of biology, Conway reported, was “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of [Isidore] Geoffroy St. Hilaire [1805-1861], of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of [Professor] Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which of course was not Darwinism, but far from it and in opposition to it. It was in fact the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being which Mr. Charles Darwin had been struggling to supersede. THE SCIENCE OF 1883

Evidently Waldo had been referring to Saint-Hilaire’s 1832-1837 HISTOIRE GENERALE ET PARTICULIERE DES ANOMALIES DE L’ORGANISATION CHEZ L’HOMME ET LES ANIMAUX … OU TRAITE DE TERATOLOGIE …, or perhaps to the English version of Volume I of this by Palmer which had appeared in 1835. Evidently, also, the assembled Brits were so tolerant toward this venturesome American minister, that he was able to mistake their politeness. At any rate, in his relentlessly self-promotional autobiography of 1904 he would proclaim that his audience had been “much startled.”

In LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, Edward Lurie would report in regard to this sort of total misunderstanding, on his pages 282-290, that: Moses Ashley Curtis told his botanist friend, “I am always suspicious of Agassiz. He has an enormous amount of facts —he is incomparable in the discovery of facts— but I am becoming continually more dissatisfied with him as a generalizer....” One reason why the academicians and laymen of Boston were so well informed on major aspects of the new biology was that Agassiz had spent so much time and effort contradicting these ideas. Before 1859, Agassiz had argued with almost every major assumption of the forthcoming Darwinian analysis. As [Asa] Gray knew and Agassiz indicated by his protestations, the world was prepared for a revival of the “development” theory. But this would be in a form that, as Gray predicted, would obviate many of the older arguments against it. In Agassiz’s view, every old argument was just as valid as ever; Darwin’s work supplied no new mechanism or interpretation but was simply a rehash of Lamarck, [Lorenz] Oken, and the VESTIGES It was hardly worth the bother, it seemed, for the director of the Harvard museum to refute the arguments again, but bother he must, because his colleagues would not let the matter rest. Agassiz’s cosmic philosophy shaped his entire reaction to the evolution idea. His definition of the relation of natural history to transcendental conceptions was that such conceptions were basic to understanding and were supported by evidence. Thus he could assert: There is a system in nature... to which the different [classification] systems of authors are successive approximations.... This growing coincidence between our systems and that of nature shows... the identity of the operations of the human and the Divine intellect; especially when it is remembered to what an extraordinary degree many a priori conceptions, relating to nature, have in the end proved to agree with reality, in spite of every objection at first offered to them by HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

empiric observers. An attitude such as this made Agassiz appear to his critics an exponent of a traditional idealism whose German education in the spirit of Naturphilosophie prevented him from admitting the validity of an objective interpretation of nature based on observable, secondary phenomena. This was an understandable reaction to Agassiz. There was an unbroken thread connecting his mental outlook with a view of nature stretching back to Plato, a view intellectually close to a concept of being in which the immaterial world was considered the essence of reality. Exemplifying this intellectual tradition, Agassiz saw natural history as the earthly representation of spirit, and thought of the Creative Power as having engineered a timeless, all- encompassing plan for the universe. This scheme of creation was rational, because nature past and present illustrated the creative intention. All facts could be subsumed under this master plan that had been fashioned in the beginning, and all apparent change explained as indicative of a predictable, fixed order in the universe. Species, the individual units of identity in nature, were types of thought reflecting an ideal, immaterial inspiration. The same was true of the larger taxonomic categories — genera, families, orders, branches, and kingdoms. All such categories had no real existence in nature. Reality could be discovered only in the character of the individual animals and plants that had inhabited and were now inhabiting the material world. The individual fossil or living form represented on earth the categories of divine thought ranging from species to kingdom and ultimately symbolized a complete identity with the highest concept of being, God. For Agassiz there was only one method by which an insight could be gained into this creative process, and that was the method of the natural scientist. The naturalist had an understanding vastly superior to the theologian; it was his expert knowledge of the data of the material world that could provide continual and ever more impressive verification of the power and grandeur implicit in the plan of creation. The fact that Agassiz thought of himself as possessing this ability provided him with the intellectual drive to achieve superior knowledge. It was this life role, moreover, that prevented a simple espousal of traditional idealism. Without constant empirical study, Agassiz would have been deprived of a basis for offering the world new demonstrations of the work of the Creative Power, such as the Ice Age. In drawing a spiritual lesson from his study, Agassiz had to create “species” that did not exist, because he could not admit variation and had to interpret the glacial epoch as another event in a long chain of divinely inspired catastrophes. It was this intellectual quality that made Agassiz such a formidable and perplexing opponent for men like Darwin and Gray. He was quite capable of making the most admirable scientific discoveries reflecting complete devotion to scientific method, but he would then interpret the data through the medium of what HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

seemed to be the most absurd metaphysics. Faced with this kind of mentality, Darwin and his defenders understandably labeled Agassiz the advocate of an outworn idealism. The tragedy of Agassiz’s relationship to Darwin’s ideas was that in a crucial decade of transformation in natural history interpretation, he had given too little thought to justifying his own viewpoint. When Agassiz finally published an integrated statement of his philosophy in 1857, the “Essay on Classification” represented ideas that had little value for his times. This publication demonstrated, however, that Agassiz was by this time entirely certain that the teachings of Naturphilosophie were incompatible with special creationism. He therefore equated this concept with the false notion that “all animals formed but one simple, continuous series,” an idea that could readily “become the foundation of a system of the philosophy of nature which suggests all animals as [being] the different degrees of development of a few primitive types.” It was but a short step from such a view to one that interpreted animal forms as sharing a unity of origin and genetic derivation, illustrating the transformation of one form into another through modification from “physical” causes. Unable to tolerate this idea, Agassiz found it necessary to abjure what he felt were these larger tendencies of Naturphilosophie, all the while retaining the mental attitude once derived from its idealism, the ability to interpret the data of experience as significant of a meaning above and beyond experience. Naturphilosophie seemed a threat to Agassiz’s special creationism primarily because it assumed a continuity in organic creation. Agassiz and his honored master Cuvier, on the other hand, deeply believed that the creative plan was so ordered as to illustrate discontinuity and the independence of natural categories. Thus catastrophes had operated to break the thread of natural history on many occasions. Moreover, since species and the larger units of identity were symbolic of divine intelligence, they were immutable and could never be said to illustrate material connection with each other. Individuals representing the divine plan were created independently and separately. This discontinuous view of creation gave the Deity much more power than believers in “development” were ever able to allow. Multiple and new creations were symbolic of the discontinuity ordained by the creator. Agassiz did believe, however, in one particular concept of continuity and development. Indebted to his German education from Dollinger, he affirmed that change was to be discerned in the life-history of the individual form, namely, the ontogenetic transformations revealed by embryology. The development of the individual from egg to adult signified, to Agassiz, a progressive, unfolding evolution along a path predetermined by the potentiality of the original egg and ending in a fixed form HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

that was the permanent character of the individual. Change and development were in this view transitory stages in the achievement of permanence. Schelling employed this concept to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being who could ordain the potentiality of highest perfection from the beginning. Agassiz drew similar comfort from embryology, synthesizing empiricism and idealism by insisting that the naturalist had to observe the development of the egg under the microscope to experience demonstrations of absolute power. Understandably, Agassiz insisted that embryology provided “the most trustworthy standard to determine relative rank among animals.” This science was the necessary basis for all classification, since study of individual development revealed how the animal conformed to the essence of its type. Individual growth reflected an unfolding of the higher categories of identity, and by studying a single fish Agassiz could see the entire scale of being from species to branch in the animal kingdom. Embryology thus illustrated the entire history of life. Agassiz, therefore, could never understand why the evolution concept of Darwin required such a great amount of time to accomplish change in species or types when he could observe change and evolution that occurred rapidly in the individual. If such change was so sudden in the history of life from egg to adult, it was incomprehensible why great periods were required to effect changes in classes, orders, or types. To Agassiz change was dynamic and catastrophic in embryology, just as it was in geology. In each instance, sudden change resulted in preordained, final purpose. Agassiz could not understand the evolutionary process because he confused two different kinds of evolution. He made the common error of his time of equating the history of the individual — ontogeny— with the history of the type or race—phylogeny. Agassiz believed that the various phases of embryological development or ontogeny were in fact determined by the inherent race history that each individual form contained within its germ as a kind of preview of things to come. Thus the embryology of the animal revealed in successive stages the predetermined scale of categories to which it belonged—species, genus, family, and so on. Agassiz was consequently very impressed with the “biogenetic law,” that ontogeny or individual development is a recapitulation of phylogeny or racial history, the history of the type being the cause of the history of the individual. His student Joseph Le Conte claimed that Agassiz had discovered this “law.” This was an unfounded assertion, because the concept had been known since the late eighteenth century, and Agassiz had learned it from his teacher Tiedemann. Agassiz’s specific contribution to the recapitulation concept was empirical. In his own words, “I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of growth in their egg, that is all.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Analysts such as Le Conte and others claimed that Agassiz’s association with the recapitulation idea made him a notable forerunner of Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth. Agassiz’s interpretation of the facts of embryology was a cosmic one: The leading thought which runs through the succession of all organized beings in past ages is manifested again in new combinations in the phases of development of the living representatives of these different types. It exhibits everywhere the working of the same creative Mind, through all times, and upon the surface of the whole globe. Moreover, Agassiz emphatically contradicted the wider uses of the recapitulation concept by men of his generation, an interpretation that viewed the separate examples of ontogeny as proof of a long history of causally connected phylogenetic transformations in an ascending scale of development from lower to higher forms beginning with the earliest ancestor and ending with contemporary creation. Agassiz insisted, therefore, that embryology showed a recapitulation of phylogeny only in the repetition of the natural history of the particular and separate type-plan to which the individual belonged. In so doing he reflected his disapproval of the assumptions of Naturphilosophie, that there was an ascending and unbroken scale of development from lower to higher forms. He was explicit on this point: It has been maintained... that the higher animals pass during their development through all the phases characteristic of the inferior classes. Put in this form, no statement can be further from the truth; and yet there are decided relations, within certain limits, between the embryonic stages of growth of higher animals and the permanent characters of others of an inferior grade.... As eggs, in their primitive condition, animals do not differ one from the other; but as soon as the embryo has begun to show any characteristic features, it presents such peculiarities as distinguish its branch. It cannot, therefore, be said that any animal passes through the phases of development which are not included within the limits of its own branch. No Vertebrate is, or resembles at any time, an Articulate; no Articulate a Mollusk.... Whatever correlations between the young of higher animals and the perfect condition of inferior ones may be traced, they are always limited to representatives of the same branch.... No higher animal passes through phases of development recalling all the lower types of the animal kingdom. Agassiz’s interpretation of the recapitulation idea had consequences for the concept of evolution. From the first, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Agassiz was much more radical in regard to recapitulation than the embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer. Agassiz believed that ontogeny was a recapitulation of adult ancestral forms, while Von Baer would grant only that recapitulation was limited to a repetition of young or intermediate forms in the life-history of ancestors and that the individual deviated from these resemblances in a progressive fashion during its growth. In 1859 Darwin cited Agassiz’s concept of adult recapitulation and Agassiz’s belief that this process of repetition in the individual signified the history of the race. For Darwin, this concept “accords well with the theory of natural selection,” and he hoped it would be proved in the future. Subsequently, Darwin accepted the Agassiz view without qualification. Agassiz’s view of recapitulation as a direct repetition of final adult forms was erroneous. Darwin’s acceptance of it had unfortunate results for the later history of the evolution doctrine. Von Baer’s view, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for the modern science of embryology by stressing the fact of individual development from egg to adult, and the very limited recapitulation of younger forms in such development. Had Darwin followed Von Baer and not Agassiz, modern embryology would not have had to rescue Von Baer’s interpretations from the obscurity in which they were placed by the triumph of Darwinism and by the ideas of such subsequent advocates of the Agassiz position as Ernst Haeckel. Von Baer, of course, opposed evolution from idealistic presuppositions, and vacillated a good deal in his own relationship to Darwinism. Nevertheless, when modern embryologists who were intellectually equipped to separate Von Baer the idealist from Von Baer the embryologist perceived the value of his view of recapitulation, they could employ it as a means of understanding phylogeny as the result of individual ontogeny in particular periods of natural history. To call Agassiz a precursor of Darwin on the basis of Darwin’s ill-considered use of an erroneous Agassiz conception is a vast mistake. In fact, when Von Baer criticized Darwin for his use of the recapitulation concept, he was in effect criticizing Agassiz. Agassiz was wrong on recapitulation, and Darwin made the same error. Darwin made other errors too, but despite gaps in his knowledge, despite ignorance of the mechanism of heredity, and despite Agassiz, Darwin was right. He was right because the evolution idea did not require the recapitulation theory for its general validity. Darwin, after all, understood phylogeny, and Agassiz did not. Regardless of the erroneous Agassiz belief that individual development was determined by previous ancestral history, it is most nearly accurate to say that the history of types and races is the result of separate, modified, individual transformations. Ontogeny “causes” phylogeny in the large sense, rather than the reverse of this process, as Agassiz believed. Phylogeny, moreover, is best understood through knowledge of the history of life. Organic development occurs through the introduction and HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

preservation of new and useful variations and the consequent influence of such transformations on the character of subsequent populations. In Von Baer’s criticisms, Darwin paid a heavy price for his use or Agassiz’s interpretation of recapitulation. To make matters worse, Darwin did not realize that Agassiz had expressed strong reservations about the very recapitulation idea he advocated and Darwin used. Agassiz criticized recapitulation, moreover, before 1859, and his criticism was both empirical and idealistic. Agassiz did so because of a growing realization that the concept was useful to advocates of the development hypothesis. Recapitulation, sometimes put forward as proof of a long, continuous sweep of natural history with types and races transformed into more advanced types, was a view of phylogeny Agassiz could never accept. Consequently, he cast doubt upon such continuity, taking issue with the logical extension of an idea he had advocated by citing evidence that demonstrated that ontogeny did not always recapitulate phylogeny in direct repetition, since many characters appeared in the individual in a sequence different from that in which they had appeared in the history of the type. Agassiz joined Von Baer both before and after 1859 in opposing concepts of development with the weapons of idealism. For Agassiz, the reality of the plan of creation was threatened by a historical view of the evolution of types and races; permanence of type was also threatened by a concept of transmutation made possible through the agency of physical processes. Hence recapitulation, to Agassiz, had to prove thought and premeditation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

1993

Publication of a reassuring book entitled THE BOOK YOUR CHURCH DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ, Tim C. Leedom editor, by “The Truth Seeker Company.” Now from time to time we run into “village atheist” types, who define themselves in opposition to the hypocrisy of religion, and from time to time we hear Henry Thoreau disparaged as one of these types who define themselves in opposition, who know everything about everything that is wrong with everybody else. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

So I looked into this new volume with some trepidation, wondering to what use they would be attempting to turn the memory of Thoreau. In scanning through the 400+ glossy pages of this publication, I failed to note any citations, and then at the end I discovered an appendix which attempted to make a list of the “Freethinkers” who are to be honored by these naysayers. And, glory be, Thoreau’s name is not on that rather extensive list! Here are a few of the “Freethinkers,” with the characterizations under which they have been selected out to be thus honored:

Freethinkers

Marlon Brando Movie actor; specializes in morally intense roles

John Burroughs Nature lover and naturalist; biographer and close friend of Walt Whitman

John Caldwell Calhoun American statesman of the early 19th century; favored states’ rights

Charles Darwin English naturalist, author of ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Erasmus Darwin English botanist and physician, grandfather of Charles

Charles Dickens Novelist

Frederick Douglass Abolitionist

Charles W. Eliot President of Harvard for over 40 years

Waldo Emerson American philosopher and author

Edward Everett Politician, minister, Harvard president

Benjamin Franklin American writer, statesman, and inventor HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Freethinkers

Mahatma Gandhi Nationalist leader, Hindu, organizer of non-violent resistance

William Lloyd Garrison Abolitionist

William Godwin English philosopher

Horace Greeley Founder of the New-York Tribune

Oliver Wendell Holmes American physician and author

Julia Ward Howe Abolitionist and Suffragist

Thomas Jefferson US President, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, philosopher

Immanuel Kant german philosopher, considered by some to be one of the greatest of modern thinkers

John Locke English philosopher

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet

James Madison President and youngest of the Founding Fathers; helped bring about ratification of the Constitution and passage of the Bill of Rights

Horace Mann American educator

Florence Nightingale English nurse, philanthropist

Thomas Paine Writer and political theorist. The mind behind the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence

Benjamin Pierce Mathematician, astronomer

Jean Jacques Rousseau French publisher and author

Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher

Percy Bysshe Shelley English romantic poet, wrote THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft

B.F. Skinner Behaviorist, psychologist, signed 1973 Humanist Manifesto

Herbert Spencer Philosopher, psychologist, sociologist

Mark Twain American author, humorist

Catherine Vogel Burned in 1539 for being a Unitarian

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German poet

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz German philosopher

Alfred Russel Wallace naturalist, devoted life to scientific entomology

Walt Whitman American poet, true inheritor of Emersonian principles

Mary Wollstonecraft Wrote VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, friend of Thomas Paine, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

21 Charles Darwin. THE LIFE OF ERASMUS DARWIN. First unabridged edition. Edited by Desmond King-Hele (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

21. Although the grandson, in the initial publication of THE LIFE OF ERASMUS DARWIN, was attempting to restore the reputation his grandfather had earned, his daughter Henrietta edited his manuscript and shortened it by some 16%, improving it in many respects but also censoring parts she considered too frank or too salacious for its Victorian audience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 11, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ERASMUS DARWIN ERASMUS DARWIN