It is interesting to contemplate a tangled 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 upon 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 by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling 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.

His son Leonard went on to be a soldier politician economist eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald FiCharles Darwinr. Darwin's book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs on his theory of atoll formation was publiCharles Darwind in May 1842 after more than three years of work and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. He wrote that the "final cause of all this wedging must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to changes" so that "One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps of in the economy of nature or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.

In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist he was honoured with a major ceremonial funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. Darwin's work establiCharles Darwind evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.