The Faber Book of Science (9 page)
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Authors: John Carey
Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of Charles, was a doctor, inventor and poet. He helped to found the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which provided the main intellectual impetus for the Industrial Revolution in England. Among its members – and Erasmus’s friends – were Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, of steam-engine fame, and Joseph Priestley (see p. 40). Erasmus’s inventions included a speaking-machine, an artificial bird with flapping wings (which remained at the drawing-board stage), a sun-operated device for opening cucumber-frames, and a horizontal windmill, which was used to grind colours at his friend Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery.
Over half a century before his grandson’s
The
Origin
of
Species,
Erasmus expounded a theory of evolution, declaring that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament’, during a time-span of ‘millions of ages’. He was the first scientist to analyse plant nutrition and photosynthesis, and to explain the process of cloud formation.
He took up poetry-writing in his fifties, and his two-part poem
The
Botanic
Garden
anticipates the ‘big-bang’ theory of the universe. The first event in the cosmos, according to Erasmus’s account, is an explosion, sparked off by God saying ‘Let there be light’, whereupon:
… the mass starts into a million suns;
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first.
Erasmus defends his explosion theory in one of the poem’s many ‘
Philosophical
Notes’:
It may be objected that if the stars had been projected from a Chaos by explosions, that they must have returned again into it from the known laws of gravitation; this however would not happen, if the whole Chaos, like grains of gunpowder, was exploded at the same time, and dispersed through infinite space at once, or in quick succession, in every possible direction.
One of the ‘second planets’ to ‘issue from the first’ in Erasmus’s account is the moon, which separates from the earth leaving a hole now occupied by the South Pacific. The Goddess of Botany, accompanied by various Gnomes, Sylphs and Nymphs, is a witness of these cosmic disturbances, and she reminds the Gnomes of the alarm they felt at the moon’s emergence:
Gnomes! how you shrieked! when through the troubled air
Roared the fierce din of elemental war;
When rose the continents, and sunk the main,
And Earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.
Gnomes! how you gazed! when from her wounded side,
Where now the South Sea heaves its waste of tide,
Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car,
Circling the solar orb, a sister star,
Dimpled with vales, with shining hills embossed,
And rolled round Earth her airless realms of frost.
The notion that the moon originated by fission from the earth, which has found some supporters in the twentieth century, became known as the ‘Darwinian theory’, not because of Erasmus but because of his great-grandson Sir George Darwin, who worked out a mathematical basis for the idea.
The second part of Erasmus’s poem,
The
Loves
of
the
Plants
(1789), ministered to the craze for botany in the 1770s and 1780s. Captain Cook’s famous voyage in the
Endeavour
had brought back to England, via Botany Bay, 1,300 hitherto unknown species of plants, thanks to the labours of young Joseph Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook. The founding of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, celebrated in Erasmus’s poem, was a monument to this new enthusiasm for greenery. The great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) had introduced the system of modern plant classification in the middle years of the eighteenth century, and Erasmus translated some of his works.
The
Loves
of
the
Plants
personifies 90 different species, and recounts their sex-lives, paying strict attention to Linnaeus’s botanical descriptions:
Sweet blooms Genista in the myrtle shade,
And
ten
fond brothers woo the haughty maid.
Two
knights before thy fragrant altar bend,
Adored Melissa! and
two
squires attend.
Meadia’s soft chains
five
suppliant beaux confess,
And hand in hand the laughing belle address;
Alike to all, she bows with wanton air,
Rolls her dark eye, and waves her golden hair.
What this means, as Erasmus’s notes explain, is that the flower of the Broom (Genista) has ten males (stamens) and one female (pistil); the Balm (Melissa) has four males and one female, with two of the males standing higher than the other two; and the American Cowslip (Meadia) has five males and one female, with the males’ anthers touching one another.
Erasmus’s romances become more complicated as the plants’ male and female organs increase in number. Lychnis, for example (Ragged Robin), has ten males and five females, the males and females being found on different plants, often at some distance from each other. ‘When the females arrive at their maturity’, Erasmus recounts, ‘they rise above the petals as if looking abroad for their distant husbands. The scarlet ones contribute much to the beauty of our meadows in May and June.’ Versified, this becomes:
Five sister-nymphs to join Diana’s train
With thee, fair Lychnis! vow – but vow in vain;
Beneath one roof resides the virgin band,
Flies the fond swain, and scorns his offered hand;
But when soft hours on breezy pinions move,
And smiling May attunes her lute to love,
Each wanton beauty, tricked in all her grace
Shakes the bright dew-drops from her blushing face;
In gay undress displays her rival charms,
And calls her wondering lovers to her arms.
Erasmus’s notes abound with curious botanical information. Of Madder, a plant that yields a red dye, he records: ‘If mixed with the food of young pigs or chickens, it colours their bones red. If they are fed alternate fortnights with a mixture of madder and with their usual food alone, their bones will consist of concentric circles of white and red’; of Menispermum (a climbing tropical plant), Erasmus notes that its berries, dropped into water, make fish drunk.
The poem correctly predicts several technological developments – among them submarines, which will exploit Priestley’s discovery of oxygen.
Led by the Sage, lo! Britain’s sons shall guide
Huge Sea-Balloons beneath the tossing tide;
The diving castles, roofed with spheric glass,
Ribbed with strong oak, and barred with bolts of brass,
Buoyed with pure air shall endless tracks pursue,
And Priestley’s hand the vital flood renew.
Rather surprisingly, Erasmus was an extremely popular and influential poet. Young Wordsworth imitated him. Coleridge called him ‘the first
literary
character in Europe’, and his great fantasy-poems,
Kubla
Khan
and
The
Ancient
Mariner,
borrow scenes and phrases from Erasmus. Shelley, his keenest disciple, took from him the idea of combining science and poetry in famous lyrics like ‘The Cloud’ and ‘The Sensitive Plant’, and followed his lead in attacking superstition, tyrants, slavery, war and alcohol.
Source: Erasmus Darwin,
The
Botanic
Garden,
1789–91.
Smallpox is a killer disease that has been compared in virulence to the Black Death. Until the eighteenth century epidemics were frequent. Survivors were often blinded or disfigured. A mode of partial immunization common in China, India and the near East was to inject some of the pus from a smallpox vesicle into the body of a healthy person. The English bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had herself been scarred by a smallpox attack two years earlier) discovered this in 1717 while resident in Adrianople, where her husband was British ambassador, and wrote to her friend Sarah Chiswell with the news.
A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they gave it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation. Every Autumn in the month of September, when the great Heat is abated, people send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small pox. They make partys for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly 15 or 16 together) the old Woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox and asks what veins you please to have open’d. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lye upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens 4 or 5 veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the Middle of the forehead, in each arm and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross, but this has a very ill Effect, all these wounds leaving little Scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who chuse to have them in the legs or that part of the arm that is conceal’d. The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day and are in perfect
health till the 8th. Then the fever begins to seize ’em and they keep their beds 2 days, very seldom 3. They have very rarely above 20 or 30 in their faces, which never mark, and in 8 days time they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded there remains running sores during the Distemper, which I don’t doubt is a great releife to it. Every year thousands undergo this Operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that they take the Small pox here by way of diversion as they take the Waters in other Countrys. There is no example of any one that has dy’d in it, and you may believe I am very well satisfy’d of the safety of the Experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little Son. I am Patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it if I knew any one of ’em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps if I live to return I may, however, have courrage to war with ’em.
Lady Mary was as good as her word. She had her own son and daughter inoculated and, on her return to England, did all in her power to encourage the practice. When a smallpox epidemic hit London in 1721, she urged Princess Caroline to inoculate the royal children. As a preliminary safeguard, six condemned criminals in Newgate were allowed to volunteer for the operation, with freedom as their reward should they survive it – as they did. The operation was then performed on the pauper children of St James’s parish, again successfully. Persuaded by these experiments, the Princess had two of her daughters inoculated, and the practice instantly became fashionable, though opposed by some clergymen who denounced it as a defiance of God’s will.
Lady Mary’s estimate of its safety was, however, over-hopeful. Roughly 1 in 50 died of inoculation, and inoculated patients tended to spread the disease. Salvation came via an obscure country doctor Edward Jenner (1749–1823), working in the Cotswolds. He was familiar with old wives’ tales to the effect that the unsightly but harmless disease of cow pox, which milkmaids caught from cows’ udders, gave protection against smallpox, and he hit on the idea that cow pox might be artificially induced. The human guinea pigs he used were a young dairymaid, Sarah Neimes, with a fresh cow pox lesion on her finger, and a boy, James Phipps, a labourer’s son. Jenner announced the results in his epoch-making paper
An
Inquiry
into
the
Causes
and
Effects
of
the
Variolae
Vaccinae,
Known
by
the
Name
of
Cow-Pox
(1798).
The more accurately to observe the progress of the infection I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculating for the cow-pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of a Dairymaid, who was infected by her master’s cows, and it was inserted on the 14th day of May, 1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two superficial incisions, barely penetrating the cutis [skin], each about an inch long.
On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla [armpit] and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight headache. During the whole of this day he was perceptibly indisposed, and spent the night with some degree of restlessness, but on the day following he was perfectly well…
In order to ascertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an affection of the system from the cow-pox virus, was secure from the contagion of the smallpox, he was inoculated the 1st of July following with variolous [smallpox] matter, immediately taken from a pustule. Several slight punctures and incisions were made on both his arms, and the matter was carefully inserted, but no disease followed. The same appearances were observable on the arms as we commonly see when a patient has had variolous matter applied, after having either the cow-pox or smallpox. Several months afterwards he was again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was produced on the constitution.
Jenner had invented the Latin name
Variolae
vaccinae
(meaning ‘smallpox of the cow’) for cow pox. The English word ‘vaccination’ was not invented until 1803, by Jenner’s disciple Richard Denning. Following the publication of his paper, vaccination swiftly spread through Europe and America, earning him worldwide fame. He became, in his own lifetime, the acclaimed saviour of thousands of Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Russians. Ironically, the English were slow to follow suit. Whereas early nineteenth-century Vienna, where an intelligent vaccination programme was enforced, became virtually smallpox-free, in London ‘the speckled monster’ (as Jenner called it) still claimed 1,700 lives each year.
Sources: Edward Jenner,
Inquiry
(1798) and
The
Complete
Letters
of
Lady
Mary
Wortley
Montagu,
ed. Robert Halsband, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965–7, volume I, pp 338–9.