Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Darwin > Status Update

"...the natives of...Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk...& he gives a laughable account of their behaviour & strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross...they held their aching heads with both hands, & wore a most pitiable expression; when beer...was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons" (256).

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved" (243).

(The closing lines of Origin of Species)

"With respect to the lapse of time not having been sufficient since our planet was consolidated for the assumed amount of organic change, and this objection, as urged by Sir William Thompson, is probably one of the gravest as yet advanced" (233).

"Rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue for its derivation" (228).

"It is...an astonishing fact that a delicate branching coralline, studded with polypi & attached to a submarine rock, should produce, first by budding & then by transverse division, a host of huge floating jelly-fishes; & that these should produce eggs, from which are hatched swimming animalcules, which attach themselves to rocks & become developed into branching corallines; and so on in an endless cycle" (220).

"All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification may be explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the Natural System is founded on descent with modification; - that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, all true classification being genealogical..." (210).

"The inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America...it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists from America, whether by occasional means of transport...and the Cape Verde Islands from Africa; such colonists would be liable to modification - the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.

"...when the warmth had fully returned, the same species, which had lately lived together on the European and North American lowlands, would again be found in the arctic regions of the Old and New Worlds, and on many isolated mountain summits far distant from each other" (189).

"If the existence of the same species at distant & isolated points of the earth's surface, can...be explained on the view of each species having migrated from a single birthplace; then, considering our ignorance with respect to former climatal & geographical changes and to the various occasional means of transport, the belief that a single birthplace is the law, seems to me incomparably the safest" (184).