The grandfather of Charles wrote the following poem, which might be considered one of the foundational verses of evolutionary biology:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
One may compare this with the hymns of gR^itsamada shaunahotra shaunaka bhArgava:
sa īṃ vṛṣājanayat tāsu garbhaṃ sa īṃ siśurdhayati taṃ rihanti |
so apāṃ napād-anabhimlātavarṇo .anyasyeveha tanvā viveṣa ||
Of great fertility, he has generated himself as a germ in those [waters]; he is their infant; he sucks the [waters]; the [waters] moisten him; apAm napAt of the waters of unfading color has entered here in a new body.
yo apsvā sucinā daivyena ṛtāvājasra urviyā vibhāti |
vayā idanyā bhuvanānyasya pra jāyante vīrudhaśca prajābhiḥ ||
All other beings are, as it were, branches of him, who, truthful, eternal, and vast, shines amid the waters with pure and divine (radiance); and the shrubs, with their products, are born (of him).
He who is in waters with his own pure splendour spreads forth widely as per the eternal law of nature; The various beings of this world have emerged as descendents of his, the plants with all their descendents have also descended from him.
mAnasa-taraMgiNI 