Important Quotations Explained
1. How have
all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation
to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct
organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful
co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe; and
only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings
to the hairs of a quadruped or feather of a bird; . . . in short,
we see beautiful adaptation everywhere and in every part of the organic
world.
2. How fleeting
are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently
how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by
nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that
nature's productions should be far “truer” in character than man's productions;
that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex
conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher
workmanship?
3. To admit
this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal,
or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the work of God a mere
mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old
and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but
had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on
the sea-shore.
4. What can
be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping,
that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of
the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed
on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same
relative positions?
5. There
is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed 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 wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
