To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.
In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
Some call it evolution, And others call it God.
Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last was complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.
In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.
I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.
It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.
Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.
Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.
A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.
The man who walks with Henslow.
Formerly Milton’s Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.
I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.