So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted.
Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion but it would take an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal can blush.
What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.
I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.
Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.
At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.
The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.
The normal food of man is vegetable.
It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.
If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.