But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.

I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence ... There seems to me too much misery in the world.

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

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 worms crawling through the damp earth and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other and dependent on each other and so complex a manner have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.