The Sage of Lichfield

ERASMUS DARWIN by Desmond King-Hele. 183 pages. Scribner. $3.95.

DOCTOR DARWIN by Hesketh Pearson. 235 pages. Walker. $5.

To the eyes of the British, eccentricity often looks like genius. In his own time (1731-1802), Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, was renowned not only as Britain's foremost physician but as a poet, scientist, inventor and conversationalist of formidable talent. He had, said Coleridge, "a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe," and King George III begged him to come to London as the royal physician (he refused, on the ground that he preferred to remain in Lichfield). The age's other great eccentric, Samuel Johnson, dismissed him as a provincial from an "intellectually barren" town. His current biographers tend to side with Coleridge, and there is little difference between them, but their books are less interesting as studies of genius than as revelations of the wild theorizing that passed for reason as England's age of scientific reason began.

Decoction of Foxglove. All biographers of Erasmus Darwin are dependent on a contemporary account written by a poetess and neighbor, Miss Anna Seward, sometimes known as "the Swan of Lichfield." Anna carried on a lifelong flirtation with him (they exchanged playful love letters on behalf of their cats), and remembered him as a man given to "sarcasm of very keen edge" and so "inclined to corpulence" that he had to have a semicircular hole cut in the table to accommodate him at meals. "A fool," the doctor used to say to Anna, "is a man who never tried an experiment." Erasmus tried them all the time, and occasionally they worked. He prescribed electric shock for jaundice and scarlet fever, purges for the gout, blood transfusions for cases of consumption. His "Commonplace Book" is full of case histories of experiments that failed: a dropsical woman who apparently vomited and died after receiving four doses of "decoction of foxglove"; his own infant daughter who died after Erasmus tried to inoculate her against measles. He was most successful, in fact, when he put his patients on diets of milk, vegetables and fruit and left them alone. His real love was inventing. On paper he devised a water closet, a diving bell, a canal lock, a horizontal windmill for grinding pigments, a hydrogen-oxygen motor, and a speaking machine "capable of pronouncing the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and Ten Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue." To improve the British climate, he suggested that the navies of the nations of the Northern Hemisphere band together to push the ice masses of the polar regions into the southern oceans. He was the founder of the famed Lunar Society, consisting of a group of scientific eccentrics whose habit of meeting by the light of the full moon, reputedly so that they could see their way home after dinner, eventually gave rise to their well-earned nickname, "Lunatics."

Survival of the Fittest. Even as staunch an admirer as Coleridge found Darwin's poetry "nauseating." Nevertheless, The Botanic Garden, a scientific treatise in rhymed couplets, was a bestseller during his lifetime, and its descriptive lines were vastly admired by many of his contemporaries:

Stretch'd o'er the marshy vale the willowy mound,

Where shines the lake amid the cultur'd ground.

Darwin had taken the lines, almost word for word, from Anna Seward, and after the poem was published, the Seward-Darwin cat correspondence ended. But The Botanic Garden was so popular that otherwise sober critics judged Darwin a greater poet than Milton.

All told, Erasmus Darwin had 14 children by two wives and one long-suffering mistress. Only one son, Robert, survived to become a doctor, and his lackluster career was a persistent disappointment to his father. But Robert became the father of Charles and Charles made the family name famous. When he advanced his theory of evolution in Origin of the Species, Charles relied partially on his grandfather's investigation of gene mutations described in the treatise Zoonomia.

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