In his surprise best seller, The Botanic Garden (1792, dated to the previous year), Erasmus Darwin produced a kind of science poetry quite unlike that written by his contemporaries or immediate predecessors. His kind only overlaps with theirs in a few passages from his posthumously published, much less well-known sequel, The Temple of Nature (1803). When this poem presents a Brooke-like list, Darwin makes a point of not losing the wood for the trees: “Time, motion, number, sunshine or the storm, /But mark varieties in Nature's form.” Brooke's idée fixe represents just one of many themes covered by Darwin: “Stoop, selfish Pride! survey thy kindred forms, /Thy brother Emmets, and thy sister Worms!” Darwin parts company with Brooke when humbling Homo sapiens to invoke lesser creatures as literally “kindred,” articulating a theory of evolution anticipating that of his now more famous grandson Charles:

The view of life's origins underlying this otherwise congenial mortification of “Imperious man” would have horrified Brooke, who might also have found subversive of orthodox Christianity the implication that such a being “styles himself the image of his God” through presumptuousness alone.

When Darwin's science poetry most nearly approaches that of Thomson and Brooke, it also most differs:

Here Darwin regroups Brooke's “around, above, below,” but only as needing another rhyme. On the other hand, the sequence of verbs from “select” to “eject,” though twice as long as Brooke's stuttering “Reflects, inflects, retracts,” has greater euphony. Darwin's “irritated tubes” would probably have baffled Thomson and Brooke, too, as exhibiting not vexation but a concept necessarily explained in “Additional Notes” (paginated separately from the poem):