...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.

I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

So great is the economy of nature, that most flowers which are fertilised by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odour chiefly or exclusively in the evening.

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio . . . each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction . . . The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Whenever I have found that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfected, and when I have been contemptuously criticised, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that 'I have worked as hard as I could, and no man can do more than this.'

I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.