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I could have sworn I had posted this earlier today, but…
Finally finished The Origin of Species, 6th Ed. by Charles Darwin. It was slow going, but the final chapter contained some really nice prose. If Darwin had been less concerned with scientific accuracy and more focused on readability, it would have made for easier reading, but it wouldn’t have been the foundational scientific classic that it is.
My favorite line is that with which the book closes:
Thus, 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. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling 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.
— Chapter XV: Recapitulation and Conclusion
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