This is another quote for my list of favorite quotes. It's about On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

I found this in the book Evolution - The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer:

Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was breathtaking, beautifully written, staunchly defended, defiantly radical. Yet it emerged long before paleontologists and geologists worked out the chronology of life on Earth, long before biologists uncovered the molecules that underlie heredity and natural selection. Not until the late twentieth century was the true scope of its power revealed.