Symbiosis or Slaughterhouse? Honeyed Analogy in Erasmus Darwin

In the eighteenth century, the role of insects in pollination was starting to be understood. The poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) held to the more traditional view that the relationship between bees and flowers was predatory rather than symbiotic. Paradoxically, however, it was the close kinship of animal and vegetable that put them in competition for the precious resource, honey. The very fact that all life could trace its origin to “one and the same kind of living filaments” turned the “warring world” into “one great slaughter-house”. The case of honey illustrates the high stakes of a Darwinian vision in which the analogy among organisms is not only a poetical conceit but an ontological reality. A work like The Botanic Garden (1792) famously allegorizes the reproduction of plants in terms of the courtship of humans, while also taking pains to establish how structural correspondences between the two instantiate the unity of God’s creation. Darwin grants a certain incommensurability between the “looser” analogies of poetry and the “stricter” ones of natural philosophy, though it would be left to his successors to recognize one application: that flowers need bees differently than bees need flowers.