From So Simple A Beginning
Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, reads the end of Origin of Species. Click the image to listen to the audio.
From the end of On the Origin of Species:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many 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... have all been produced by laws acting around us...
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 law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.
