Because of the recent earthquake that hit and killed thousands in Japan, because we in this part of the world are waiting for The Big One, because Darwin is one of the greatest writers in the English language, it’s worth our time and effort to return to the marvelous earthquake chapter in The Voyage of the Beagle:
A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. In the forest, as a breeze moved the trees, I felt only the earth tremble, but saw no other effect.
Ahem. That ought to read “Earthquake” in your headline.
Incredible that he described the earth as “a thin crust over fluid” a century before the theory of Plate Tectonics took hold. The man was brilliantly ahead of his time.
“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.”
Grandeur? In scale, sure. Most beautiful? Nah. Funny that we have more evidence for biological evolution than we do for gravity at this point.
@2! I know! Darwin is eerie that way!