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(...) There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, have been initially breathing into a few forms or one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(...) The importance of embryological characters and rudimentary organs in classification is intelligible because an arrangement is only so far natural as it is genealogical.

(...) On the view of descent with modification, we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless condition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do on the ordinary doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated, and can be accounted for by the laws of inheritance.

(...) and the more nearly any two forms are related in blood, the nearer they will generally stand to each other in time and space; in both cases, the laws of variation have been the same, and modifications have been accumulating by the same power of natural selection.

(...) This fact, together with the seeds and eggs of many common forms being very minute and better fitted for distant transportation, probably accounts for a law which has long been observing, and which has lately been admirably discussed by Alph. de Candolle regarding plants, namely, that the lower any group of organisms is, the more widely it is apt to range.

(...) The various beings thus left stranded may be compared with savage races of man, driven up and surviving in the mountain-fastnesses of almost every land, which serve as a record, full of interest to us, of the former inhabitants of the surrounding lowlands.

(...) On the other hand, all the prevailing laws of palaeontology proclaim, as it seems to me, that species had been producing by ordinary generation: old forms had been supplying by new and improved forms of life, produced by the laws of variation still acting round us, and preserved by Natural Selection.

It may ask in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied giant monsters have left behind them in South America the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This fact cannot for an instant have been admitted. These massive animals have become wholly extinct and have left no progeny. (...)

(...) Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be writing, more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the abruptly changed forms of life entombed in our consecutive but widely separated formations. On this view, the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished or even disappear.

First crosses between forms known to be varieties, or sufficiently alike to be considered varieties, and their mongrel offspring, are generally fertile but not quite universally. (...)