Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.

The man who walks with Henslow.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.