Erasmus Darwin
5 quotes
Biography
Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, abolitionist, inventor, freemason, and poet.
"Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,And insect-shoals successive pass away,Increasing wants the pregnant parent vexWith the fond wish to form a softer sex. .."
"I have got a most exquisitely fine Balance, and a very neat Glass Box, and have all this day been employ'd in twisting the Necks of s—in vain! ...I beg ...you will procure me one of their necks to be twisted into a little Hook according to the... the reverse of this Paper: It must be truly hermetically seal'd, air-tight ...I intend to foretell every Shower... and make great medical discovery as far as relates to the Specific Gravity of Air: and from the Quantity of Vapor.—Thus the Specific Gravity of Air, should be as the Absolute Gravity (shew'd by the Barometer) and as the Heat (shew'd by Boulton's thermometer). Now if it is not always found as these two (that is as one and inversely as the other) then the deviations at different Times must be as the Quantity of dissolved Vapour in the Air. The common s only shew when the Air is in a Disposition to receive or part with moisture, not at all the Quantity it contains."
"It consists of a windmill sail placed horizontally like that of a smoak-jack, surrounded by an octagon tower... [U]pright pillars are connected together by oblique horizontal boards... at an angle of about 45 degrees... so as to form a complete octagon including the horizontal windmill sail near the top... [T]he wind as it strikes... from whatever quarter it comes, is bent upwards and then strikes against the horizontal wind-sail. These horizontal boards... may... be made to turn upon an axis a little below their centres of gravity, so as to close themselves on that side of the octagon tower most distant from the wind. ...[I]t was found on many trials by Mr. Edgeworth... and by myself, that the wind by being thus reverted upwards by a fixed planed board did not seem to lose any of its power. And as the height of the tower may be made twice as great as the diameter of the sail, there is reason to conclude that the power of this horizontal wind-sail may be considerably greater, than if the same sail was placed nearly vertically..."
"[Unitarianism is] a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian."
"Darwin was also experimenting with gases and asked Boulton to make him a flask with a twisted neck. ...he hoped to elucidate the properties of air... In modern jargon, Darwin is saying that the density, ρ, of the air should be proportional to the pressure, p, and inversely proportional to the temperature T. In symbols, this gives ρ = constant ✕ p/T, which is precisely the , now written p/ρ = RT, where R is constant and T is the absolute temperature. This was in 1763, 30 years before the law’s official discovery, and is a good example of his insight in physical science. On this occasion it is thrown off in a letter, not a formal paper"