Indian Reed
Canna indica

American Cowslip
Dodecatheon meadia

Round-Leaf Sundew
Drosera rotundifolia

Lamb of Tartary
Cibotium barometz

Sensitive Plant
Mimosa pudica

Peruvian Bark Tree
Cinchona officinalis

Golden Shower Tree
Cassia fistula

Night-Blowing Cereus
Selenicereus grandiflorus

Pheasant’s-Eye
Adonis annua

Indian Reed
Canna indica

American Cowslip
Dodecatheon meadia

Round-Leaf Sundew
Drosera rotundifolia

Lamb of Tartary
Cibotium barometz

Sensitive Plant
Mimosa pudica

Peruvian Bark Tree
Cinchona officinalis

Golden Shower Tree
Cassia fistula

Night-Blowing Cereus
Selenicereus grandiflorus

Pheasant’s-Eye
Adonis annua

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Golden Shower Tree Cassia fistula

Golden Shower Tree Cassia fistula

Golden Shower Tree
Cassia fistula

Cassia by Weinmann Cassia by Weinmann

J. W. Weinmann

Phytanthoza iconographia  (1739)

J. W. Weinmann
Phytanthoza iconographia

(1739)

“Many of the same flowers in question grow on a penducle. They consist of five golden-yellow small petals set not otherwise than in a circle. They emanate a pleasant and lovely odor in great quantity, especially in the early hours. For this reason, Egyptians like to regale one another with walks beneath these trees.”

Cassia fistulia by Blackwell Cassia fistulia by Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell

Herbarium Blackwellianum  (1760)

Elizabeth Blackwell
Herbarium Blackwellianum

(1760)

“1. This is a large tree, the leaves are grass-green, the flowers yellow.

“2. It grows in the East and West Indies, as well as in Egypt.

..........

“The Alexandrian Cassia tree, which we represent according to the Blackwellian model, is completely different from the Brazilian species. It is bare and without leaves when it blooms; besides, it bears plumate leaves opposite to one another.”

Cassia by Woodville Cassia by Woodville

William Woodville

Medical Botany  (1793)

William Woodville
Medical Botany

(1793)

“The pulp of Cassia has been long used as a laxative medicine, and being gentle in its operation, and seldom occasioning griping or uneasiness of the bowels, has been thought well adapted to children, and to delicate or pregnant women. Adults, however, find it of little effect, unless taken in a very large dose, as an ounce or more, and therefore to them this pulp is rarely given alone, but usually conjoined with some of the brisker purgatives.”

Cassia by Vietz Cassia by Vietz

Ferdinand Vietz

Icones plantarum (1800)

Ferdinand Vietz
Icones plantarum

(1800)

“This pulp is even supposed to promote urination, as some assert, and generally dyes it with a green or brown color; as for the use of this pulp, thus one can dispense with it quite easily in the practice of medicine, since we have in its place the much cheaper plum butter, which does the job, and the tamarind pulp, which does the job far better. But for all that, no particularly special power is to be found within it. In fact, the Cassia pulp is still worse in that it does not keep long, spoiling more quickly than the others.”

Cassi by Canna indica herbarium specimen

M. E. Descourtilz

Flore médicale des Antilles  (1822)

M. E. Descourtilz
Flore médicale des Antilles

(1822)

“The Cassia, whose pods are worth those of Egypt, Arabia, etc., is originally from Egypt and the East Indies, but it was transported to America and to Antilles, where its cultivation leaves nothing to be desired. The shape of its pendent fruit gives it an appearance so peculiar that a resident of the Garonne bank, dismounting his horse, exclaimed: What a good country! There are sausages just hanging from the trees!”

Cassia herbarium specimen Cassia herbarium specimen

A. A. Lasseigne

NYBG Steere Herbarium Specimen (1974)

A. A. Lasseigne
NYBG Steere Herbarium

(1974)

Herbarium Specimen

Location: Brazil. Pará. Belém. Parque Kennedy, adjacent to Baia do Guajara, W Belem.

Collectors: A. A. Lasseigne (03 Aug 1974).

Description: Tree, ca. 5 m tall. 0.5 cm diam at ground level—several branched. Phenology of specimen: Flower.

Coordinates: (-1.4558, -48.5042)

Cassia herbarium specimen Cassia herbarium specimen

T. A. Zanoni

NYBG Steere Herbarium Specimen (1992)

T. A. Zanoni
NYBG Steere Herbarium

(1992)

Herbarium Specimen

Location: Dominican Republic. Peravia. Cordillera Central: 7 km. al N de la carretera Baní-Azua, en el camino N hacia Honduras y Matadero. Alt. 300 m. (984 ft.)

Collectors: T. A. Zanoni with R. García, F. Jiménez (19 Sep 1992).

Description: Arbol de 8-10 m., corola amarilla; fr. verde y no maduro todavía. Phenology of specimen: Flower, Fruit.

Habitat: Bosque árido de Prosopis juliflora, Cordia alliodora, Annona squamosa.

Cassia fistula (Golden Shower) - cultivated Cassia fistula (Golden Shower) - cultivated

Arthur Chapman

Cassia fistula (2008)

Arthur Chapman
Cassia fistula

(2008)

Location: Rurrenbaque, Bolivia.

Date: 26 November 2008.

Camera: Canon EOS 400D.

Aperture: ƒ/4.0.

Shutter: 1/50.

Focal Length: 75.0mm.

ISO: 200.

Previous Next
Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  (1791)

Fair Cassia trembling hears the howling woods,
And trusts her tawny children to the floods.—
Cinctured with gold while ten fond brothers stand,
And guard the beauty of her native land,
Soft breathes the gale, the current gently moves,
And bears to Norway’s coasts her infant-loves.420
—So the sad mother at the noon of night
From bloody Memphis stole her silent flight;
Wrapp’d her dear babe beneath her folded vest,
And clasp’d the treasure to her throbbing breast,
With soothing whispers hushed its feeble cry,425
Press’d the soft kiss, and breathed the secret sigh.—
—With dauntless step she seeks the winding shore,
Hears unappall’d the glimmering torrents roar;
With Paper-flags a floating cradle weaves,
And hides the smiling boy in Lotus-leaves;430
Gives her white bosom to his eager lips,
The salt-tears mingling with the milk he sips;
Waits on the reed-crown’d brink with pious guile,
And trusts the scale monsters of the Nile.—
—Erewhile majestic from his lone abode,430
Embassador of heaven, the Prophet trod;
Wrench’d the red Scourge from proud Oppression’s hands,
And broke, curst Slavery! thy iron bands.

Hark! hear ye not that piercing cry,
Which shook the waves and rent the sky!—

E’en now, e’en now, on yonder Western shores441
Weeps pale Despair, and writing Anguish roars:
E’en now in Afric’s groves with hideous yell
Fierce Slavery stalks, and slips the dogs of hell;
From vale to vale the gathering cries rebound,
And sable nations tremble at the sound!—
—Ye Bands of Senators! whose suffrage sways445
Britannia’s realms, whom either Ind obeys;
Who right the injured, and reward the brave,
Stretch your strong arm, for ye have power to save!
Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort,
Inexorable Conscience holds his court;450
With still small voice the plots of Guilt alarms,
Bares his mask’d brow, his lifted hand disarms;
But, wrap’d in night with terrors all his own,
He speaks in thunder, when the deed is done.
Hear him, ye Senates! hear this truth sublime,455
“He, who allows oppression, shares the crime.”

Cassia. l. 415. Ten males, one female. The seeds are black, the stamens gold-color. This is one of the American fruits, which are annually thrown on the coasts of Norway; and are frequently in so recent a state as to vegetate, when properly taken care of, the fruit of the anacardium, cashew-nut; of cucurbita lagenaria, bottlegourd; of the mimosa scandens, cocoons; of the piscidia erythrina, logwood-tree; and cocoa-nuts are enumerated by Dr. Tonning (Amaen. Acad. 149.) amongst the emigrant seeds....

Thus a rapid current passes from the gulf of Florida to the N.E. along the coast of North-America, known to seamen by the name of the Gulf-Stream. A chart of this was published by Dr. Franklin in 1768, from the information principally of Capt. Folger.

(II.3:124—7)

Taxonomy

Linnæan Classification

Class: X. Decandria (Ten Males)
Order: I. Monogynia (One Female)
Genus: Cassia
Species: Cassia fistula

Modern Classification

Class: Equisetopsida C. Agardh
Sub-
class:
Magnoliidae Novák ex Takht.
Super-
order:
Rosanae Takht.
Order: Fabales Bromhead
Family: Fabaceae Lindl.
Genus: Cassia L.
Species: Cassia fistula L.
On the Way to Abolition

There is perhaps no better passage than Erasmus Darwin’s verse on Cassia to exemplify his philosophy of poetry and the essence of his poem, The Botanic Garden. First, the links that connect the seedpods of the Cassia plant to the biblical story of Moses and then to Britain’s abolition movement illustrate Darwin’s view of poetry as a series of images, vignettes that convey meaning all at once, rather than over time. “The Poet writes principally to the eye” (p. 48).

Second, the passage reveals the political activism at the heart of Darwin’s poem, a facet of it that is easy for the modern reader to overlook, but one that would have been readily apparent to Darwin’s contemporaries. In fact, the poem inspired multiple satires, the most clever and incisive being “The Loves of the Triangles,” which detailed the escapades of geometrical figures in jest of Darwin’s treatment of plants in his “The Loves of the Plants” (the second part of The Botanic Garden). The tripartite satire, written by three authors, appeared during April 1798 in The Anti-Jacobin. This conservative publication, inaugurated by George Canning in 1797, was, as its title implies, a reaction to the radicalism of the Jacobins, the group responsible for instituting the Reign of Terror (1793—4) during the French Revolution. In short, the journal intended to combat any elements that had the faintest whiff of French liberalism, in political, philosophic, scientific, or other guises. Darwin, who had sympathized with each of these, became a target for attack.

All of this derision, however, is yet to come when Darwin pens his seemingly desultory lines on the Cassia, a plant that presents problems of its own. Whereas Darwin provides the species for most other plants that figure in the poem, he gives only the genus, Cassia, here, leaving the reader to figure out which species he has in mind. If we consult Darwin’s translation of Linnæus, A System of Vegetables (1782), we find 30 different possible species of Cassia listed. The key to the passage, though, is that the seedpod of this particular species originates from the Americas, floats on the Gulf Stream, and makes its way to Norway’s shores. As a result, this Cassia must grow in the Americas.

Although this information narrows the list, the species determination is helped substantially more by tracking down Darwin’s own source for the passage, that is, the dissertation by the Norwegian naturalist who observed the seedpods washing up on shore. Henricus Tonning delivered the dissertation, Rariora Norvegiae, under the direction of Linnæus, in 1768. Tonning cites another, Bishop Gunner, who had catalogued all the fruits that washed up on Norway’s shores. One of these is Cassia fistula, thus revealing the species that Darwin must have had in mind. Beyond these Norwegian naturalists, Darwin, and a few others, though, it is difficult to find any references to the transatlantic passage of this plant’s seedpod. One surprising place it does turn up is in one of Henry David Thoreau’s unpublished naturalist manuscripts written after Walden. The 354-page text treats the dispersal of seeds and, sure enough, references the ability of the C. fistula to cross the Atlantic.

Darwin is interested, however, not only in the fact of this migration, but also in the means. The current that carries the seedpod from the Americas to Norway is identified as the Gulf Stream, which had caught the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who, along with Timothy Folger, created a chart of it and gave the current the name it has still to this day.

The image of the seedpod floating on the current invokes another: Moses floating on the Nile. “And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with lime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink” (Exod. 2:3). In the biblical story, Moses precipitates the Exodus, freeing the Jews from Egyptian slavery. This theme of manumission, finally, allows Darwin to launch into the crescendo that ends the Canto: he pleads for abolition, a fight already well underway in Britain at the close of the eighteenth-century, at a time when the slave trade was flourishing.

Britain’s abolition movement is said to be the first political campaign, employing many of the techniques that are now taken for granted. It pioneered the use of investigative journalism, famously carried out by Thomas Clarkson, who went to the ports to interview sailors about the slave trade, later bringing the information he gathered to Parliament. Abolition’s most important parliamentary paladin was William Wilberforce, persuaded to defend the cause by Clarkson, in what may be the first instance of political lobbying. The abolition campaign also relied on judicial interventions, as in the case of the slave Jonathan Strong, on whose behalf Clarkson’s collaborator, Granville Sharp, advocated, in order to procure a landmark ruling that effectively abolished slavery in England (but not in its colonies) in 1772 by outlawing the resale of slaves to the colonies once they were in the country. Another aspect of the campaign was the publication of narratives written by slaves themselves. In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published an account of his life, describing how he and his sister had been kidnapped as children in South Nigeria and sold into slavery in Barbados and then in Virginia. The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano is considered to be one of the earliest books published by an African writer.

Finally, no political campaign is complete without a sound branding and merchandizing effort. This was certainly true of the abolition movement. Darwin himself references the campaign’s most iconic image, an anti-slavery cameo produced by his Lunar Society friend, Josiah Wedgwood, who is best known today for his blue and white pottery. Wedgwood’s medallion shows a slave in a supplicatory position, wrists in chains; its slogan reads, “Am I Not a Man and Brother?” The image was printed on all kinds of goods—snuff boxes, collector plates, brooches, and so on—and remains well known to this day. Its success is perhaps owing to the fact that the image has a very strategic appeal. Its creators knew their market. The slave’s position evokes the figure of a praying Christian, an important point of debate at the time. The slave is portrayed, not in rebellion, but rather as peaceful and even docile, notwithstanding the fact that freedom, often enough, was won through violent revolt. (The rebellion in Haiti was a predominant reason for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807.) Of the cameo, Darwin remarks that Wedgwood “distributed many hundreds, to excite the humane to attend to and to assist in the abolition of the detestable traffic in human creatures” (p. 87n). Darwin’s sympathies for the cause are thus stated in no uncertain terms.

What is not as clear, however, is why Darwin chose such a seemingly convoluted path to get to this impassioned plea against slavery. Would it not have been better to address one of the plants—sugarcane, coffee, cotton, tobacco, etc.—whose cultivation, harvest, manufacture, and consumption were truly at the heart of the slave trade? A point made grotesquely clear in the anonymous apology for slavery cited on this page. In general, the British were sensitive to the connection: 300,000 of them staged a boycott of slave-produced sugar in 1791. The slavery-free sugar produced in response to such boycotts and to meet the needs of socially-conscious consumers may well be the first fair-trade product. Darwin himself is by no means ignorant of the connection. In Phytologia, he recognizes the importance of sugar for animals and vegetables (as well as the dangers of its excess.) He interrupts his analyses, though, with the following: “And,—and what?—Great God of Justice! grant, that it may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may thence give happiness to the laborer, as well as to the merchant and consumer” (p. 7). Why not, then, use sugarcane as an entrance to abolition?

As mentioned, the passage as it stands conforms well to Darwin’s ideal of poetry, and many of his other verses are also characterized by what may seem tenuous links. At the same time, his seedpod trajectory contains certain under- or unstated advantages. First, it allows Darwin to remind his readers of the Exodus, freedom from slavery in the Bible. This reminder was significant because Scripture remained a source of evidence on both sides of the abolition debate. Second, and likely more poignant rhetorically, the transatlantic migration of the seedpod recalls another forced one, the Middle Passage, which identifies the part of the triangular slave trade in which Africans were shipped to the New World. The description of its horrors played a critical role in parliamentary deliberations. In reviewing those deliberations in general up until the dissolution of the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson recounts testimonies of its miseries: suffocation from overcrowding, forced eating, despair, insanity, suicide by fasting and drowning. “And more than one,” he says, “were seen to wave their hands in triumph, ‘exulting’ (to use the words of an eye-witness) ‘that they had escaped’” (p. 223).

Franklin-Folger Chart of the Gulf Stream (1768)
Franklin-Folger chart of the Gulf Stream (1768)

—by Benjamin Franklin and Timothy Folger

Frances Arabella Rowden’s
A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany  (1801)

CLASS IX.

CASSIA.m

ENNEANDRIA, MONOGYNIA

In the drear convent’s solitary gloom
Where superstition rears a living tomb,
And beauty, doom’d in early life to part
From each lov’d scene, which pleas’d her youthful heart,
Mourns the sad path, by cruel zealots trod,
And bow, reluctant, to the shrine of God.
While the deep organs sound the hallow’d strain
With solemn step proceed the pious train.
In polish’d censers, wrought with wond’rous care,
Nine cherub boys the holy incense bear.
In clouds of smoke the fragrant odors rise,
Fraught with the sinner’s pray’r, and captive’s sighs.

m Cassia.—Nine stamens, one pistil. It is characterized by a flower with five roundish concave petals; it has nine declining stamens, three of the lower are long, and three of the upper shorter; the summits of the three lower are large, arched, beaked, and separated at their points. In the center is a long taper germen, which becomes a long pod divided by transverse partitions, one or two roundish seeds fastened to the margin of the upper valve.

pp. 49—50

Granville Sharp’s
The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God  (1776)

But it is not enough, that the Laws of England exclude Slavery merely from this island, whilst the grand Enemy of mankind triumphs in a toleration, throughout our Colonies, of the most monstrous oppression to which human nature can be subject!

And yet this abominable wickedness has not wanted advocates, who, in a variety of late publications, have attempted to palliate the guilt, and have even ventured to appeal to Scripture for the support of their uncharitable pretensions: so that I am laid under a double obligation to answer them, because it is not the cause of Liberty alone for which I now contend, but for that which I have still much more at heart, the honor of the holy Scriptures, the principles of which are entirely opposite to the selfish and uncharitable pretensions of our American Slaveholders and African Traders.

(pp. 2—3)

Anonymous,
No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love: A Poem  (1791)

Noodles*, who rave for abolition
Of th’ African’s improv’d condition†,
At your own cost fine projects try;
Dont rob—from pure humanity.

*If the abettors of the Slave trade Bill should they think they are too harshly treated in this Poem, let them consider how they should feel if their estates were threatened by an agrarian law; (no unplausible measure) and let them make allowances for the irritation which themselves have occasioned.

†That the Africans are in a state of savage wretchedness, appears from the most authentic accounts. Such being the fact, an abolition of the slave trade would in truth be precluding them from the first step towards progressive civilizations, and consequently of happiness, which it is proved by the most respectable evidence they enjoy in a great degree in our West-India islands, though under well-regulated restraint.

(p. 7)

Wedgwood Medallion (1787)
Wedgewood Medallion

—from Victoria and Albert Museum

Anonymous,
An Apology for Slavery; or, Six Cogent Arguments Against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave-Trade  (1792)

—What is worse, they become, in time, almost necessary: so that we cannot conveniently dispense with them.—Such is precisely our case, with respect to the productions of our colonies: we cannot live without sugar and rum: not to mention other commodities which we import from the West Indies. The question at issue then is, whether or not six millions of White British people, to who at least rum sugar have become a sort of necessary Luxury, should, contrary to the Laws of Luxury, sacrifice the use of rum and sugar to the liberty of six thousand Black people from the wilds of Africa?

(pp. 30—1)

On the Way to Abolition

There is perhaps no better passage than Erasmus Darwin’s verse on Cassia to exemplify his philosophy of poetry and the essence of his poem, The Botanic Garden. First, the links that connect the seedpods of the Cassia plant to the biblical story of Moses and then to Britain’s abolition movement illustrate Darwin’s view of poetry as a series of images, vignettes that convey meaning all at once, rather than over time. “The Poet writes principally to the eye” (p. 48).

Second, the passage reveals the political activism at the heart of Darwin’s poem, a facet of it that is easy for the modern reader to overlook, but one that would have been readily apparent to Darwin’s contemporaries. In fact, the poem inspired multiple satires, the most clever and incisive being “The Loves of the Triangles,” which detailed the escapades of geometrical figures in jest of Darwin’s treatment of plants in his “The Loves of the Plants” (the second part of The Botanic Garden). The tripartite satire, written by three authors, appeared during April 1798 in The Anti-Jacobin. This conservative publication, inaugurated by George Canning in 1797, was, as its title implies, a reaction to the radicalism of the Jacobins, the group responsible for instituting the Reign of Terror (1793—4) during the French Revolution. In short, the journal intended to combat any elements that had the faintest whiff of French liberalism, in political, philosophic, scientific, or other guises. Darwin, who had sympathized with each of these, became a target for attack.

All of this derision, however, is yet to come when Darwin pens his seemingly desultory lines on the Cassia, a plant that presents problems of its own. Whereas Darwin provides the species for most other plants that figure in the poem, he gives only the genus, Cassia, here, leaving the reader to figure out which species he has in mind. If we consult Darwin’s translation of Linnæus, A System of Vegetables (1782), we find 30 different possible species of Cassia listed. The key to the passage, though, is that the seedpod of this particular species originates from the Americas, floats on the Gulf Stream, and makes its way to Norway’s shores. As a result, this Cassia must grow in the Americas.

Although this information narrows the list, the species determination is helped substantially more by tracking down Darwin’s own source for the passage, that is, the dissertation by the Norwegian naturalist who observed the seedpods washing up on shore. Henricus Tonning delivered the dissertation, Rariora Norvegiae, under the direction of Linnæus, in 1768. Tonning cites another, Bishop Gunner, who had catalogued all the fruits that washed up on Norway’s shores. One of these is Cassia fistula, thus revealing the species that Darwin must have had in mind. Beyond these Norwegian naturalists, Darwin, and a few others, though, it is difficult to find any references to the transatlantic passage of this plant’s seedpod. One surprising place it does turn up is in one of Henry David Thoreau’s unpublished naturalist manuscripts written after Walden. The 354-page text treats the dispersal of seeds and, sure enough, references the ability of the C. fistula to cross the Atlantic.

Darwin is interested, however, not only in the fact of this migration, but also in the means. The current that carries the seedpod from the Americas to Norway is identified as the Gulf Stream, which had caught the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who, along with Timothy Folger, created a chart of it and gave the current the name it has still to this day.

The image of the seedpod floating on the current invokes another: Moses floating on the Nile. “And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with lime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink” (Exod. 2:3). In the biblical story, Moses precipitates the Exodus, freeing the Jews from Egyptian slavery. This theme of manumission, finally, allows Darwin to launch into the crescendo that ends the Canto: he pleads for abolition, a fight already well underway in Britain at the close of the eighteenth-century, at a time when the slave trade was flourishing.

Britain’s abolition movement is said to be the first political campaign, employing many of the techniques that are now taken for granted. It pioneered the use of investigative journalism, famously carried out by Thomas Clarkson, who went to the ports to interview sailors about the slave trade, later bringing the information he gathered to Parliament. Abolition’s most important parliamentary paladin was William Wilberforce, persuaded to defend the cause by Clarkson, in what may be the first instance of political lobbying. The abolition campaign also relied on judicial interventions, as in the case of the slave Jonathan Strong, on whose behalf Clarkson’s collaborator, Granville Sharp, advocated, in order to procure a landmark ruling that effectively abolished slavery in England (but not in its colonies) in 1772 by outlawing the resale of slaves to the colonies once they were in the country. Another aspect of the campaign was the publication of narratives written by slaves themselves. In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published an account of his life, describing how he and his sister had been kidnapped as children in South Nigeria and sold into slavery in Barbados and then in Virginia. The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano is considered to be one of the earliest books published by an African writer.

Finally, no political campaign is complete without a sound branding and merchandizing effort. This was certainly true of the abolition movement. Darwin himself references the campaign’s most iconic image, an anti-slavery cameo produced by his Lunar Society friend, Josiah Wedgwood, who is best known today for his blue and white pottery. Wedgwood’s medallion shows a slave in a supplicatory position, wrists in chains; its slogan reads, “Am I Not a Man and Brother?” The image was printed on all kinds of goods—snuff boxes, collector plates, brooches, and so on—and remains well known to this day. Its success is perhaps owing to the fact that the image has a very strategic appeal. Its creators knew their market. The slave’s position evokes the figure of a praying Christian, an important point of debate at the time. The slave is portrayed, not in rebellion, but rather as peaceful and even docile, notwithstanding the fact that freedom, often enough, was won through violent revolt. (The rebellion in Haiti was a predominant reason for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807). Of the cameo, Darwin remarks that Wedgwood “distributed many hundreds, to excite the humane to attend to and to assist in the abolition of the detestable traffic in human creatures” (p. 87n). Darwin’s sympathies for the cause are thus stated in no uncertain terms.

What is not as clear, however, is why Darwin chose such a seemingly convoluted path to get to this impassioned plea against slavery. Would it not have been better to address one of the plants—sugarcane, coffee, cotton, tobacco, etc.—whose cultivation, harvest, manufacture, and consumption were truly at the heart of the slave trade? A point made grotesquely clear in the anonymous apology for slavery cited on this page. In general, the British were sensitive to the connection: 300,000 of them staged a boycott of slave-produced sugar in 1791. The slavery-free sugar produced in response to such boycotts and to meet the needs of socially-conscious consumers may well be the first fair-trade product. Darwin himself is by no means ignorant of the connection. In Phytologia, he recognizes the importance of sugar for animals and vegetables (as well as the dangers of its excess). He interrupts his analyses, though, with the following: “And,—and what?—Great God of Justice! grant, that it may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may thence give happiness to the laborer, as well as to the merchant and consumer” (p. 7). Why not, then, use sugarcane as an entrance to abolition?

As mentioned, the passage as it stands conforms well to Darwin’s ideal of poetry, and many of his other verses are also characterized by what may seem tenuous links. At the same time, his seedpod trajectory contains certain under- or unstated advantages. First, it allows Darwin to remind his readers of the Exodus, freedom from slavery in the Bible. This reminder was significant because Scripture remained a source of evidence on both sides of the abolition debate. Second, and likely more poignant rhetorically, the transatlantic migration of the seedpod recalls another forced one, the Middle Passage, which identifies the part of the triangular slave trade in which Africans were shipped to the New World. The description of its horrors played a critical role in parliamentary deliberations. In reviewing those deliberations in general up until the dissolution of the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson recounts testimonies of its miseries: suffocation from overcrowding, forced eating, despair, insanity, suicide by fasting and drowning. “And more than one,” he says, “were seen to wave their hands in triumph, ‘exulting’ (to use the words of an eye-witness) ‘that they had escaped’” (p. 223).

Taxonomy

Linnæan Classification

Class: X. Decandria (Ten Males)
Order: I. Monogynia (One Female)
Genus: Cassia
Species: Cassia fistula

Modern Classification

Class: Equisetopsida C. Agardh
Sub-
class:
Magnoliidae Novák ex Takht.
Super-
order:
Rosanae Takht.
Order: Fabales Bromhead
Family: Fabaceae Lindl.
Genus: Cassia L.
Species: Cassia fistula L.
Anonymous,
No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love: A Poem  (1791)

Noodles*, who rave for abolition
Of th’ African’s improv’d condition†,
At your own cost fine projects try;
Dont rob—from pure humanity.

*If the abettors of the Slave trade Bill should they think they are too harshly treated in this Poem, let them consider how they should feel if their estates were threatened by an agrarian law; (no unplausible measure) and let them make allowances for the irritation which themselves have occasioned.

†That the Africans are in a state of savage wretchedness, appears from the most authentic accounts. Such being the fact, an abolition of the slave trade would in truth be precluding them from the first step towards progressive civilizations, and consequently of happiness, which it is proved by the most respectable evidence they enjoy in a great degree in our West-India islands, though under well-regulated restraint.

(p. 7)

Wedgwood Medallion (1787)
Wedgewood Medallion

—from Victoria and Albert Museum

Thomas Clarkson’s
An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African  (1789)

To place this in the clearest, and most conspicuous point of view, I shall throw some of my information on this head into the form of a narrative: I shall suppose myself on a particular part of the continent of Africa, and relate a scene, which, from, its agreement with unquestionable facts, might not unreasonably be presumed to have been presented to my view, had I been actually there.

And first, I will turn my eyes to the cloud of dust that is before me. It seems to advance rapidly, and, accompanied with dismal shrieks and yellings, to make the very air, that is above it, tremble as it rolls along. What can possibly be the cause? I will inquire of that melancholy African, who is walking dejected upon the shore....

“Alas!,” says the unhappy African, “the cloud that you see approaching, rises from a train of wretched slaves. They are going to the ships behind you. They are destined for the English colonies....”

“As soon as the ships that are behind you arrived, the news was dispatched into the inland country; when one of the petty kings immediately assembled his subjects, and attacked a neighboring tribe. The wretched people, though they were surprised, made a formidable resistance; as they resolved, almost all of them, rather to lose their lives than survive their liberty. The person whom you see in the middle, is the father of the two young men, who walk on each side of him. His wife and two of his children were killed in the attack, and his father being wounded, and on account of his age, incapable of servitude, was left bleeding on the spot where this transaction happened.”

(pp. 81—3)

“The Loves of the Triangles“  (1820)

A MATHEMATICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL POEM.

INSCRIBED TO DR. DARWIN.

CANTO I.

Stay your rude steps, or e’er your feet invade
The Muses’s haunts, ye Sons of War and Trade!
No you, ye Legion Fiends of Church and Law,
Pollute these pages with unhallow’d paw!

Debased, corrupted, groveling, and confined5
No Definitions touch your senseless mind;
To you no Postulates prefer their claim,
No ardent Axioms your dull souls inflame;
For you, no Tangents touch, no Angles meet,
No Circles join in osculation sweet!10

Ver. 1—4. Imitated from the introductory couplet to the Economy of Vegetation.
“Stay your rude steps, whose throbbing breasts infold
The legion Fiends of Glory and of Gold.”
This sentiment is here expanded into four lines.

Ver. 6. Definition.—A distinct notion explaining the Genesis of a thing—Wolfius.

Ver. 7. Postulate.—A self-evident proposition.

Ver. 8. Axiom.—An indemonstrable truth.

Ver. 9. Tangents.—So called from touching, because they touch Circles, and never cut them.

Ver. 10. —Circles— See Chamber’s Dictionary, Article Circle.

Ditto. Osculation—For the Osculation, or kissing of Circles and other Curves, see Huygens, who has veiled this delicate and inflammatory subject in the decent obscurity of learned language.

Ver. 10. —Circles— See Chamber’s Dictionary, Article Circle.

Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (pp. 114—5)

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  • J. W. Weinmann, Phytanthoza iconographia (1745)
  • Carl Linnæus, Species plantarum (1753)
  • Elizabeth Blackwell, Herbarium Blackwellianum (1773)
  • Carl Linnæus, System of Vegetables (1783)
  • Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791)
  • William Woodville, Medical Botany (1793)
  • Erasmus Darwin, Phytologia (1791)
  • Ferdinand Vietz, Icones plantarum (1800)
  • Frances Arabella Rowden, A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany (1818)
  • M. E. Descourtilz, Flore médicale des Antilles (1822)