Darwin, Erasmus. A poet and physician. Born in Elston near Newark in 1731. He studied at Cambridge, obtained a doctor's degree at Edinburgh, and settled at Lichfield as a physician. He was a man of great and varied talent, but some of his opinions were deemed extravagantly eccentric. His "Botanic Garden" was admired as a fine specimen of polished verse, and his "Zoonomia," or "The Laws of Organic Life," was admitted to be ingenious, though built upon an hypothesis which was repudiated as absurd. In 1781 he moved from Lichfield to Derby, where he died in 1802.

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