[pages 410, 413]

I have been familiar with Darwin's name for forty years when, embarked on the Beagle under FitzRoy's command, he visited the extreme south of the continent, for I knew the ship and its crew and, later on, [from] The Journal of researches which I had to cite not a few times with reference to [litigation over] the Straits [of Magellan]. You will recall that I was never very exercised about our southern territories, because I didn't think they were worth expending a single barrel of gunpowder in their defence, and I refrained from employing fantastic descriptions to excite the imagination of those people who still hoped to find the El Dorado for which our fathers sought in vain, in order to prevent a war over that Holy Sepulcher of traditionalist illusions.

We must suppose that the Creator awoke in a really bad mood on the fifth day [of creation] and looked on with bemusement as he deposited in the Brazilian Amazon eighteen hundred different species of fish, so beautifully disciplined that even today they preserve the habitats assigned to each species.

Darwin simplified the task [of classification] by explaining the variability of organic forms according to their needs and location. It is a well-known fact that what induced him to suspect it was a little bird of Chilean origin, which he encountered in the Galapagos archipelago which, without ceasing to be the same [species] had modified its beak — short, large, thick, or thin—according to whether in its habitat it found insects, seeds, grains or hard nuts to eat, in the same way that the eucalyptus, almost the only tree in Australia, which is so familiar to us, has acquired one hundred forms, according to whether the terrain is swampy or dry, low-lying or mountainous.