For the first fifty-seven years of his life Erasmus Darwin worked hard as a physician in the Midland counties of England and earned the highest reputation as a doctor. He was also an ingenious experimenter in physical science, a compulsive inventor of mechanical gadgets, and a leader in the technological innovations associated with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Another of his interests was botany, and in the 1780s he spent several years translating the botanical works of Linnaeus. In 1789 he began a new career as a poet with the publication of The Loves of the Plants. This long poem in rhyming couplets was the second part of a longer poem, The Botanic Garden. (Part 1 was published in 1792 with "1791" on its title page and is usually bound with the third, 1791 edition of part 2.) The verse was augmented by more than a hundred pages of "Notes" providing an up-to-date, select...