Darwin's Imagery

Darwin tends to use metaphors drawn from organic, rather than mechanical, topics. Post Romantics such as Carlyle and Ruskin had these same technics. One of his most famous pieces of imagery was in The Orgin of Species Chapter 4 "Natural Selection. He compares a tree to his theory of natural selection, telling how this evolved over time. He did this by taking each part of the tree and relating it to a part of the natural selection process. This turned out to be one of his key points of his theory.