Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
Till facts be grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see the bearing of scattered facts.
I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.
If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.
Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.
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.
Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.