United States or Vatican City ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So far as Darwin could afterwards judge, no impression was made upon his own mind. He had previously read his grandfather's "Zoönomia," in which similar views had been propounded, but no discernible effect had been produced upon him.
Calling logic to my aid, I declared that it was a Wasp; and I could not have hit the mark more truly. Charles Darwin, in fact, informed me afterwards that his grandfather wrote 'a Wasp' in his "Zoonomia."
His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, anticipated Lamarck's views in his Zoonomia, which Darwin at one time "greatly admired." His father was "convinced" of the "inherited evil effects of alcohol," and to this extent at least he strongly impressed the belief in the inheritance of acquired characters upon his children's minds.
Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia, and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far- reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side evolutionism, in its crude form."
The former was simply the creative hypothesis with the creator left out; the latter had already been propounded by De Maillet and Erasmus Darwin, among others; and, later, systematically expounded by Lamarck. Darwin's opinion of the scientific value of the "Zoonomia" has already been mentioned.
As Darwin had read the works of Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, who had written a famous treatise under the title of "Zoonomia," he was familiar with the evidences known in his student days tending to prove that organic evolution was a real natural process.
It begins by tracing the genesis or original formation of Space to a single point, in the same manner as the elder Darwin had, in his 'Zoonomia, traced the whole organized universe to his six Filaments.
Darwin, in his 'Zoonomia, reports a case where an officer, holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel, could not tolerate a breakfast in which this odious article was wanting; but, as a savage retribution invariably supervened within an hour or two upon this act of insane sensuality, he came to a resolution that life was intolerable with muffins, but still more intolerable without muffins.
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." It is the manner of theologians to say that such and such an objection "has been refuted over and over again," without at the same time telling us when and where; it is to be regretted that Mr.
He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, an eminent physician, naturalist, and poet, who in 1794-1796 published an important work entitled Zoönomia, or the Laws of Organic Life. Charles Darwin was heir to a fortune, and in youth the possession of ample means prevented him from taking any deep interest in studying for a profession, although he did study medicine and, later, for the church.
Word Of The Day