Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was a leading intellectual of 18th century England. He was a respected physician, a well-known poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist. He formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). He also presented his evolutionary ideas in verse, in particular in The Temple of Nature

"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing."

From The Temple of Nature. 1802.