What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron?

Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time

In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions.