Darwin saved his most vivid and poetic language for his concluding paragraph. It is also the only place in the entire volume where a form of the word "evolve" is found (the contemporary term to describe the alteration of one species to another was "transmutation"):
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, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, 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.
Artwork of a "tangled bank" found at http://neurophilosophy.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/tangled.jpg
This ends the Origin of Species installments. Happy New Year.
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