Darwin’s Last Words

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of different kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed
forms, so different from each other, and dependant on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting
around us. (…) From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,
namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ch. XIV