"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
"Mr. Darwin's hypothesis is not, so far as I am aware, inconsistent with any known biological fact; on the contrary, if admitted, the facts of Development, of Comparative Anatomy, of Geographical Distribution, and of Palaeontology, become connected together, and exhibit a meaning such as they never possessed before; and I, for one, am fully convinced that if not precisely true, that hypothesis is as near an approximation to the truth as, for example, the Copernican hypothesis was to the true theory of the planetary motions."
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Source: Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. Book by Thomas Henry Huxley. Chapter 2, p. 127, 1863.
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