“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.”
– Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802
The Monkey’s Pipe
Charles Darwin’s Grandfather Erasmus, laying it down in poem form long before his grandchild could write ‘the Origin of Species’… We will get to more of his work…
I thought this Lecture from Purdue’s 1891 yearbook ‘The Debris’ fit the theme…
I’ve tried to track the source to the poem from the lecture, I could not find it although trail starts in public and collage newspapers around 1889 only citing “Pulse”…
A Theory of Evolution
Way back in those archaic days when time for man got ripe,
A tailless ape set on a tree and smoked a penny pipe,
And as he smoked, lo, thought began. He knew that he enjoyed,
(Be not surprised at this — you see, that ape was anthropoid.)
Thus thought began, and thought is all that makes a man;
So be it known that thus in smoke the human race began.
But mark how in a circle move all sublunary things;
Events, like smoke, resolve themselves into expanding rings;
And as the monkey’s pipe made thought, and thought created man,
The cigarette shall take him back to just where he began.
Sign with a monkey smoking a pipe. French School – Date: 18th century – Museum: Musée du Tabac, Bergerac, France