19th-century Biologist Quotes

The influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.

Education is habit-forming rather than information; illumination rather than indoctrination, inspiration rather than compulsion.

Edwin Grant Conklin

Though we must hold to our faith in the evolution of species, there is little evidence as to how it has come about, and no clear proof that the process is continuing in any considerable degree at the present time.

William Bateson

We look to medical research to discover remedial measures to insure better health and more happiness for mankind.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

When we are confronted with facts which we see no possibility of understanding save on a single hypothesis, even though it be an undemonstratable one, we are naturally led to accept the hypothesis, at least until a better one can be found.

August Weismann

Mr. S. had a letter to Brigham Young, and took us to interview him, horrid old wretch! My hand felt dirty for a week after shaking hands with him.

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

A single substantive term is a better instrument of thought than a paraphrase.

The universe did not become sterile with the first production of life. It is continuously creative now as in the past.

Herbert Spencer Jennings

The Darwinian process of continued interplay of a random and a selective process is not intermediate between pure chance and pure determinism, but qualitatively utterly different from either in its consequences.

Much testing; accuracy and precision in experiment; no guesswork or self-deception.

In physiology, as in all other sciences, no discovery is useless, no curiosity misplaced or too ambitious, and we may be certain that every advance achieved in the quest of pure knowledge will sooner or later play its part in the service of man.

Ernest Starling

Developmental mechanics...is the doctrine of the causes of organic forms.

The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection.

It seems likely that in the next few years a combination of antibiotics with different antibacterial spectra will furnish a "cribrum therapeuticum " from which fewer and fewer infecting bacteria will escape.

Alexander Fleming

If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired thatwhich could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.

Thomas Henry Huxley