Darwin, Erasmus 1731-1802
English physician and poet

Born near Newark, Nottinghamshire, he studied at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. At Lichfield he became a popular physician and prominent figure on account of his ability, his radical and freethinking opinions, his poetry, his eight-acre botanical garden, and his imperious advocacy of temperance in drinking. After his second marriage in 1781, he settled in Derby, where he founded a Philosophical Society. He was grandfather of Charles Darwin by his first wife, and of Francis Galton by his second. He anticipated Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's views on evolution, and also those of his own grandson. He edited translations of Carolus Linnaeus's work, and wrote a long verse work, The Botanic Garden (1789). His chief prose works are Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96) and Phytologia (1799).