The Problem of Human Life: Embracing the "evolution of Sound" and "evolution Evolved," with a Review of the Six Great Modern Scientists, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Haeckel, Helmholtz, and Mayer

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Hall, 1880 - Evolution - 512 pages
 

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Page 29 - That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into...
Page 452 - If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind?
Page 452 - Several writers have misapprehended or objected to the term Natural Selection. Some have even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the being under its conditions of life.
Page 396 - Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder. If gifted with these qualities, and he studies his subject for years, and devotes his lifetime to it with indomitable perseverance, he will succeed, and may make great improvements ; if he wants any of these qualities, he will assuredly fail.
Page 263 - In the earlier ages of the church it held that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun. moon, and stars revolved around it.
Page 445 - And as Natural Selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
Page 513 - I may be permitted to say, as some excuse, that I had two distinct objects in view : firstly, to show that species had not been separately created ; and, secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change, though largely aided by the inherited effects of habit, and slightly by the direct action of the surrounding conditions.
Page 447 - Natural selection acts only by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being...
Page 102 - Imagine one of the prongs of the vibrating fork swiftly advancing. It compresses the air immediately in front of it, and when it retreats it leaves a partial vacuum behind, the process being repeated at every subsequent advance and retreat.
Page 472 - Hence there can be no doubt that the quagga affected the character of the offspring subsequently begot by the black Arabian horse.

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