# Quote — Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

> I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator.

- Author: [Charles Darwin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin.md)
- Book: [On the Origin of Species](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species.md)
- Page: 484
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#XIV._Recapitulation_and_Conclusion) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species/i-believe-that

## More from this book

> I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.

p. 421 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species/i-see-no-good.md)

> [T]he several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter, seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent, that I should without hesitation adopt this view, even if it were unsupported by other facts or arguments.

p. 457 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species/t-he-several-classes.md)

> What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions? ... Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle?—yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillæ. Analogous laws govern the construction of the mouths and limbs of crustaceans. So it is with the flowers of plants. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.

p. 434 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species/what-can-be-more.md)