Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/37

 34 ostracism in case we made a departure from the well beaten path.

The next important figure in evolution is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great Charles Darwin. He was a country physician, a poet, and a very accurate naturalist, but unfortunately buried his ideas in volumes of verse and of combined medicine and philosophy. He believed in the spontaneous origin of the lower animals, but maintained that all of the higher forms were products of natural reproduction. The transition from water-to-land-dwelling animals he illustrated, not by fanciful creations, but by the classic example of the development of the frog, which begins life as a legless tadpole, and ends it as an animal incapable of breathing under water.

To man Dr. Darwin gave much attention, devoting a whole canto to the human hand—"The hand, first gift of Heaven!"—and outlining the development of man's various faculties. Farther on he describes the struggle for existence in lines which remind one of Tennyson's description of nature, except that they lack Tennyson's inevitable syrupiness. Evidently, however, Darwin fails to connect this struggle with its obvious result, the survival of the fittest.

Dr. Darwin's theory of evolution differed from that of Buffon in at least one important respect. Nowhere does he stress the direct influence of environment in the production of variations; on the contrary, he maintained that modifications spring from the reactions of the organism. In this he clearly stated the