February 12, 1809

Charles Darwin's dates, (February 12, 1809  to April 19, 1882) may not be to mind, but his importance in biology is central in our cultural heritage. We have an excerpt from On The Origin of Species (1859), and we have bracketed our excerpt with a few of Darwin's words on ignorance. 

...[S]o profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!...

I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.....Humble-bees [sic] alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease [a flower] and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite creditable that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!....

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

Thus Darwin in a major treatise of the western world, mentioning cats, and other topics only tenuously connected to cats, but important to the author of this blog.