The Development Theory: A Brief Statement for General Readers |
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50 cents ancestors animal or plant animals animals and plants apes axolotl become beginning birds body Boston brain breed carboniferous cause cell cenozoic changes color common condition continent creation Dana's Manual Darwin descent development theory dicotyledons domestic earth embryo Eohippus eozoic Europe evidence evolution example fact fauna feet female fishes flint flowering plants foraminifera fossil genera genus geological age Haeckel HANDBOOK horse human hundred illustration insects instance islands kind known latter LEE & SHEPARD less life-history living lizards lower animals mals mammals Manual of Geology mesozoic microscopic natural selection naturalists Neanderthal O. C. Marsh organs Origin of Species period pollen produced Professor Protozoa quoted rabbits race regard region reptiles resemblance result river-drift says seeds sexual shells silurian skull snails spores striking sub-kingdom teeth thing tion toes trees tropical variations varieties vary vegetable vertebrates Wallace wild species
Popular passages
Page 209 - America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of the continent. These facts seemed to throw some light on the origin of species, — that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home it occurred to me (in 1837) that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years I allowed myself to...
Page 206 - ... would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!11 Vegetable life he believes...
Page 52 - ... and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product.
Page 6 - The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane...
Page 27 - On the evidence of palaeontology, the evolution of many existing forms of animal life from their predecessors is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact ; it is only the nature of the physiological factors to which that evolution is due which is still open to discussion.
Page 171 - ... size, the cranial capacities of some of the lower apes fall nearly as much, relatively, below those of the higher Apes as the latter fall below Man. Thus, even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes ; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.