paragraph about "the electric word" of John Hunter, "arrested and progressive development," and also the paragraph which follows it, from the essay, believing them to have been part of it when read in Cambridge in 1853, to show that Mr. Emerson, from hints of Hunter, accepted the Evolution doctrine five years before Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species. Mr. Conway explains Mr. Emerson's reference to Darwin by supposing him to refer to the poem of Erasmus Darwin, the father.
Being much interested in this question, I have carefully examined the remains of the 1854 lecture, and, while the Introductory part is almost identical with that of the essay, the paragraph beginning "The electric word" is not there, while the one preceding it is, as well as that following it, beginning "The hardest chemist." Of course it is possible that the sheet is lost, but I believe that Mr. Emerson inserted the paragraph about Hunter later. In the Biographical Sketch in the first volume of this edition I have dwelt at some length upon Mr. Emerson's early interest and pleasure in the Evolution beliefs of the ancient philosophers, and the daring guesses and demonstrations of the scientific men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Page 8, note 1. Mr. Emerson had visited the Hunterian Museum of Anatomy in London under the guidance of his friend Richard Owen, its curator. In the early pages of the chapter "Natural History of Intellect," in the volume of that name, is a reference to the strange thoughts and sympathies which the sight of the arrangement of inorganic and organic specimens in advancing series had aroused in him, when he visited the Fardin des Plantes in Paris, in 1833.
Page 8, note 2. Mr. Conway, in searching Hunter's works for the "electric word" mentioned by Mr. Emerson, found
