In the latest edition this passage remains unaltered, except in one
unimportant respect. What could more completely throw us off the
scent of the earlier writers? If they had written anything worthy of
our attention, or indeed if there had been any earlier writers at
all, Mr. Darwin would have been the first to tell us about them, and
to award them their due meed of recognition. But, no; the whole
thing was an original growth in Mr. Darwin's mind, and he had never
so much as heard of his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.

Dr. Krause, indeed, thought otherwise. In the number of Kosmos for
February 1879 he represented Mr. Darwin as in his youth approaching
the works of his grandfather with all the devotion which people
usually feel for the writings of a renowned poet. {8b} This should
perhaps be a delicately ironical way of hinting that Mr. Darwin did
not read his grandfather's books closely; but I hardly think that Dr.
Krause looked at the matter in this light, for he goes on to say that
"almost every single work of the younger Darwin may be paralleled by
at least a chapter in the works of his ancestor: the mystery of
heredity, adaptation, the protective arrangements of animals and
plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of
the emotions and sociological impulses; nay, even the studies on
infants are to be found already discussed in the pages of the elder
Darwin." {8c}

Nevertheless, innocent as Mr. Darwin's opening sentence appeared, it
contained enough to have put us upon our guard. When he informed us
that, on his return from a long voyage, "it occurred to" him that the
way to make anything out about his subject was to collect and reflect