Nature and Elements

Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant,

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,

You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. of the Treasury Bench

Kent, sir—everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops, and women.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

What the waves were always saying.

Slowly, silently, now the moon

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

My man Friday.

They go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

[Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

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.

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

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.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits. on man’s probable ancestors

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd

Mad dogs and Englishmen

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

He prayeth well, who loveth well

And a thousand thousand slimy things

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;