Mounir’s Reviews > The Origin > Status Update

Captain Fitzroy announced: " This is the highest mountain in Tierra del Fuego, above seven thousand feet. It is herewith named Mount Darwin.
- p. 265

He remembered Alexander Pope's dictum:
"The proper study of mankind is man."
He could not preserve "man" in a bottle of spirits as he did fish and marine life, or mount him on pins in little boxes as he did beetles, but he hound his horizon so enormously expanded by his inland travels as well as the ports of call that he was no longer content to write about natural philosophies alone.

"How we all bumble into thinking of mountains and rocks as hard and immutable," he declared, "when at some distant time they were gaseous and fluid."
He returned to Dona Francisca's and laid out his twelve-day collection of life forms from the pampas. It never occurred to him that his rocks were not as alive as the cacti, snakes or scorpions he had gathered.

The next day the whaleboats were sailing parallel to the granite ridge which appeared to be the backbone of Tierra del Fuego. They came into a large expanse of water. Captain Fitzroy raised his arm to get attention.
"Gentlemen, I herewith name this expanse of water Darwin Sound, and it shall be so recorded in our survey."
The color rushed to Charles's face. He was taken wholly by surprise,...

"At first sight everyone would pronounce this to be a snake, but these two small hind legs, or rather fins, could mark the passage by which nature joins the lizards to the snakes."
Fitzroy looked startled.
" You sound like your grandfather in Zoonomia, trying to project a transition from one species to another. I remember him writing about the great changes we see naturally produced in animals after their nativity."

Most sailors were religious because the sea was an unnaural place for men to live. God couud plunge the ship to the bottom whenever He wished. It made sense to stand in well with him.

He found himself wondering whether the gaudy uniforms enlarged the man within them. Or, like a coat of mail, protected little men hiding behind the rows of gold buttons. He surmised that an answer would be vouchsafed to him during the four-year cruise.