Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend the apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells … John Keats, Ode to Autumn
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers. ibid.
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies. ibid.
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. ibid.
That man can interrogate as well as observe Nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution. William Osler, Aphorisms from his Bedside Teaching, 1961
’Tis the hand of Nature and we women cannot escape it. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 1932
It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1839
Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout the world every variation even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good, silently and insensibly working. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the laps of ages. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, and various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth and reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and yet so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we can think 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 along 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. ibid.
We behold the face of Nature bright with gladness. Every single organic being around us may be seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. That each lives by a struggle at some period of its life. That heavy destruction inevitably falls either upon the young or old during each generation or at recurrent intervals. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows. Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force. ibid.
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. ibid.
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature! Charles Darwin, letter to J D Hooker 13th July 1856
By 1844 Darwin had placed Malthus’s ideas on population at the core of his theory of national selection as a mechanism by which evolution occurred. The war of nature destroyed the weaklings. Darwin’s Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species, BBC 2009
For a hundred and fifty years a revolutionary idea has been spreading all over the world. It has helped us unravel the mysteries of creation. Transforming our understanding of life on Earth. And our own place in Nature. But this idea has implications that go far beyond science. Its legacy reaches deep into every area of our lives. Andrew Marr, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, BBC 2009
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well-defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well-marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals? Alfred Russel Wallace, autobiography
It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animal’s organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained. ibid.
Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s ‘Being greater than which nothing can be conceived’, it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. Daniel C Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolutions and the Meaning of Life
Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 1/13: Lower than the Angels, BBC 1973
But Nature, that is evolution, has not fitted man into any specific environment. ibid.
Sometimes the stone had a natural grain ... The notion of discovering an underlying structure in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring Nature. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 3/13: The Grain in the Stone
Physics is the knife that cuts into the grain of Nature. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 4/13: The Hidden Structure
The story of the British gentlemen and their scientific eccentricities is not irrelevant. It was such men who made Nature romantic. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 8/13: The Drive for Power
Nature works by steps ... I call it stratified stability. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 10/13: World Within World
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the woods, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs. Anton Chekhov
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. John Lubbock
My apprehensions come in crowds;
I dread the rustling of the grass;
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass. William Wordsworth, The Affliction of Margaret, 1807
Nature then to me was all in all. William Wordsworth
By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature! We are thine. William Wordsworth, Evening Voluntaries, 1835
On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude. William Wordsworth, The Excursion
The moving accident is not my trade;
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts. William Wordsworth, Hart-Leap Well, 1800
More pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams. William Wordsworth, Laodamia, 1815