It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with many worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all benn produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by Reproduction; Variability from the direct and indirect actions of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse, a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life; and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 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 while this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin

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