December 12, 1731

Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731 to April 18, 1802) wrote The Temple of Nature, (1802,) where we find these lines:

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.

Some context to this philosophic excerpt is provided in these words:

'Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth century England, a man with a remarkable array of interests and pursuits. Erasmus Darwin was a respected physician, a well known poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist.

'As a naturalist, he formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). He also presented his evolutionary ideas in verse... Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming "one living filament". He wrestled with the question of how one species could evolve into another. Although some of his ideas on how evolution might occur are quite close to those of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin also talked about how competition and sexual selection could cause changes in species: "The final course of this contest among males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propogate the species which should thus be improved". Erasmus Darwin arrived at his conclusions through an "integrative" approach: he used his observations of domesticated animals, the behaviour of wildlife, and he integrated his vast knowledge of many different fields, such as paleontology, biogeography, systematics, embryology, and comparative anatomy. ..'

This approach is also evident in his The Botanic Garden (1792), described in a modern edition (2017) as "an epic poem that aims to "enlist the Imagination under the banner of Science." Part I, The Economy of Vegetation, sings the praises of British industry as a dance of supernatural creatures while part II, The Loves of the Plants, wittily employs metaphors of human courtship to describe the reproductive cycles of hundreds of flowers. Darwin supplements his accomplished verses with (often much longer) "philosophical notes" that offer his idiosyncratic perspective on the scholarly controversies of the day.

It is the notes to The Botanic Garden where we find this apercu:

The...Nepeta ...[is] particularly delightful to cats; no other brute animals seem pleased with any odors but those of their food or prey.

I have also read that this Darwin wrote, "To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense; " however I can only find this quote in poorly sourced books.