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.
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