SOURCE: “Erasmus Darwin, Robert John Thornton, and Linnaeus' Sexual System,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring, 1974, pp. 295-320.

In the following excerpt, Bush considers the effect of Darwin's poetical interpretation of the ideas contained in Linnaeus' Sexual System on the pioneering botanical engravings in Dr. Robert John Thornton's New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus (1797-1807).

Between the years 1797 and 1807 Dr. Robert John Thornton produced his masterwork, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus—a publication of enormous size devoted to celebrating the science of botany through hand-colored engraved plates and poetry. The poetry by such happily forgotten poets as Miss Seward, “the Swan of Lichfield,” and Henry James Pye, poet laureate from 1790 to 1813, has passed out of memory. The plates, however, are one of those outstanding and unique achievements of art, well known to enthusiasts of botanical illustration, but still generally ignored as one...