Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on the contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he saw at once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out ‘Mr. Buffon’s’ half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions.  The great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.  Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minute marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies, so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.  Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changing their shapes and colours.  If man can make a pouter or a fantail out of the common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with, produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single common ancestor?  It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor—­bold, at least, for the times he lived in—­when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous touch of the devil.  But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the courage of their opinions more than most men.  So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants of a single similar original form, and even that ’one and the same kind of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.’

The eighteenth century laughed, of course.  It always laughed at all reformers.  It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most eccentric man.  His ‘Temple of Nature,’ now, and his ‘Botanic Garden,’ were vastly fine and charming poems—­those sweet lines, you know, about poor Eliza!—­but his zoological theories were built of course upon a most absurd and uncertain foundation.  In prose, no sensible person could ever take the doctor seriously.  A freak of genius—­nothing more; a mere desire to seem clever and singular.  But what a Nemesis the whirligig of time has brought around with it!  By a strange irony of fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.