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In 1795 and 1796, appeared the two volumes of Zoonomia, or Laws of Organic Life, the produce of long labour and much consideration. What profit a physician may derive from this book I am unable to determine; but I fear that the general reader will too often discover in it a hazardous ingenuity, to which good sense and reason have been sacrificed.
"Can it be," he queries, "that one form of organism has developed from another; that different species are really but modified descendants of one parent stock?" The alluring thought nestled in his mind and was nurtured there, and grew in a fixed belief, which was given fuller expression in his Zoonomia and in the posthumous Temple of Nature.
Accordingly he says soon after, not that our ideas are caused by, or consequent on, certain organic phenomena, but “our ideas are animal motions of the organs of sense.” And this confusion runs through the four volumes of the Zoonomia; the reader never knows whether the writer is speaking of the effect, or of its supposed cause; of the idea, a state of mental consciousness, or of the state of the nerves and brain which he considers it to presuppose.
To my surprise, I there found that what I had been reading could not by any possibility refer to me, for the preface ran as follows: "In the February number of a well-known German scientific journal, Kosmos, Dr. Ernest Krause published a sketch of the 'Life of Erasmus Darwin, the author of the 'Zoonomia, 'Botanic Garden, and other works.
As for the statement in the passage quoted from Mr. Wallace, to the effect that Lamarck's hypothesis "has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species," it is a very surprising one. The best attempt at an answer to Erasmus Darwin that has yet been made is Paley's Natural Theology, which was throughout obviously written to meet Buffon and the Zoonomia.
I by no means accede to the doctrine that ladies cannot attend to anything else when they are working: besides, it is contrary, is not it, to all the theories of Zoonomia? Does not Dr. Darwin show that certain habitual motions go on without interrupting trains of thought? And do not common sense and experience, whom I respect even above Dr. Darwin, show the same thing? To MISS SOPHY RUXTON.
Erasmus Darwin we believed to be a forgotten minor poet, but ninety-nine out of every hundred of us had never so much as heard of the "Zoonomia." We were little likely, therefore, to know that Lamarck drew very largely from Buffon, and probably also from Dr.
He one day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened in silent astonishment, and as far as I can judge without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the 'Zoonomia' of my grandfather, in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me.
* Mania Mutabilis. See Darwin's Zoonomia, vol. ii. Class III. 1.2. where similar cases are stated. Such, for some time, was the course of my meditations. My weakness, and my aversion to be pointed at as an object of surprize or compassion, prevented me from going into public. I studiously avoided the visits of those who came to express their sympathy, or gratify their curiosity.
Thomas Brown's reply to Darwin's Zoönomia, yet there is too much reason to believe that it was all along cherished by not a few private thinkers, who had imbibed the spirit of Hobbes and Priestley; and now it is beginning to speak out, in terms too unambiguous to be misunderstood, in such works as "The Purpose of Existence" and the "Letters" of Atkinson and Martineau.
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