World Treasures of the Library of Congress - Beginnings
Sections: Introduction | Creation | Explaining and Ordering | Recording the Experience

How can we explain and order the universe and cope with it?

Petrus Apianus. Astronomicum Caesareum. (The Emperor's Astronomy)

There is a grandeur in [a] view of life, with its several powers, [as] having been originally breathed by the Creator 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.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.

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