Darwin's Grandfather

And the Erasmus Darwins of Massachusetts

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Erasmus was a full-time physician who traveled an average of 10,000 miles a year to visit patients. He was a founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and a prolific inventor. Among his designs were a canal lift, a speaking machine, a pantograph handwriting copier, the steering system used by modern automobiles, a steam turbine, a hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine, and a multi-mirror telescope. Erasmus was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of American independence.

Erasmus Darwin translated Linnaeus from Latin to English, inventing dozens of botanical terms in the process. His two long poems, “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of Plants” (combined as The Botanic Garden) introduced mainstream readers to the sciences, especially plant biology, and included hundreds of pages of essays and notes explaining the concepts in Darwin’s verse. Erasmus used the poems to comment on the events of the day, making no secret of his support for the abolition of slavery and the French Revolution.

Zoonomia was Erasmus Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” was printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership beyond the walls of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Erasmus’ posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.

Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

Zoonomia was immensely successful. In addition to American and Irish editions, it was translated into German, Italian, French and Portuguese. The European Magazine said Zoonomia “bids fair to do for Medicine what Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has done for Natural Philosophy.” The Vatican responded to Darwin’s ideas by placing Zoonomia on its Index of Banned Books. The Temple of Nature was reviled by The Anti-Jacobin Review for its “total denial of any interference of a deity,” while the Gentleman’s Magazine called the poem “glaringly atheistical.” Even Erasmus’ one-time friend, the Unitarian Joseph Priestley, said “if there be any such thing as Atheism, this is certainly it.” Priestley was living in Pennsylvania by this time, and may have seen the book in T. & J. Swords’ 1804 American edition.

Erasmus Darwin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1793. His fame in the new United States has been assumed to be owing to his friendship with Franklin and sympathy for revolutionary struggles in America and France. But it may be partly due to Zoonomia, which was read so widely in the nation’s new medical colleges and beyond. Erasmus popularity among regular people may also spring from his straightforward, secular presentation of evolutionary ideas and his skepticism of authority. Erasmus warned against unreasoning belief. “In regard to religious matters,” he said, “there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and…is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.”

Being an early evolutionist is interesting, but what I found even more interesting was that Erasmus Darwin’s popularity in America was so great that over a hundred children in Massachusetts between 1800 and 1850 were apparently named after him. I was so surprised to discover a half dozen of them in the remote hill-town of Ashfield where I had gone to find Dr. Charles Knowlton that I did a whole project trying to track them down. I made a video about that a couple of years ago, which I’ll post here using Substack’s newly improved video feature: