author : Charles R. Darwin

The full title of the 1859 first edition is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The "definitive" 6th edition has the reduced title The Origin of Species.

p463. 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 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.

[Note: the phrase "by the Creator" did not appear in the first edition.]