A Victorian hallucinogen!

My current favorite quote, by Adam Gopnik in his book Angels and Ages, about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:

 

“It’s a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds’ giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them.  What looks like the fixed, unchanging solitude of the beach and ocean suddenly becomes alive to, vulnerable to, and endless chain of change and movement.  It’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.”