19th-century Botanist Quotes

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Hugo De Vries

David Starr Jordan

Asa Gray

George Washington Carver

Luther Burbank

Agnes Arber

The days are too short even for love; how can there be enough time for quarreling?

Life can be studied fruitfully in its highest as well as its lowest manifestations. The biochemist can tell us much about protoplasmic organisation, but so can the artist. Life is the business of the poet as well as of the physiologist.

Edmund Ware Sinnott

A record of research should not resemble a casual pile of quarried stone; it should seem "not built, but born", as Vasari said in praise of a building.

Truth is on a curve whose asymptote our spirit follows eternally.

We are not called upon to construct a theory of the universe even upon every well-attested fact, and the sooner this is learned the more time will be saved and the more functional will the observing powers remain.

John Merle Coulter

Nature produces individuals and nothing more

Charles Edwin Bessey

If we may use a metaphor, we might say that Botanical Science is like a mountaineer, who, after long, weary climbing, only discovers that after all there still rises - steep and apparently impossible to scale - the real peak; but, notwithstanding this, on casting his eyes around, he finds himself well rewarded for the toil he has undergone.

Karl Ritter von Goebel

One of the redeeming features of rubbish heaps, ballast grounds and waste lands is that they furnish a lurking place for numerous wanderers and outcasts of the vegetable kingdom.

Willard Nelson Clute

We must never conceal from ourselves that our concepts are creations of the human mind which we impose on the facts of nature, that they are derived from incomplete knowledge, and therefore will never exactly fit the facts, and will require constant revision as knowledge increases.

Every species of plant is a law unto itself.

Henry A. Gleason (botanist)

I am fully conscious that a complete presentation of the regions visited is a task beyond my power. All I can strive to do is convey an illusion-my own illusion

Frank Kingdon-Ward

Forgive me for suggesting one caution; as Demosthenes said, "Action, action, action," was the soul of eloquence, so is caution almost the soul of science.

[Luigi Ferrarese] is an enlightened and philanthropic physician of Naples, who has for several years been zealously pursuing the study of Phrenology, and endeavouring to promote its application to those branches of science, morals and legislation, which he perceives it so well calculated to benefit. He has met with much persecution, but he has persevered, and it is with pleasure we perceive that there is one mind at least, in Naples, imbued with the importance of his views

Walter Calverley Trevelyan

It was to Hofmeister, working as a young man, an amateur and enthusiast, in the early morning hours of summer months, before business, at Leipzig in the years before 1851, that the vision first appeared of a common type of Life-Cycle, running through Mosses and Ferns to Gymnosperms and Flowering Plants, linking the whole series in one scheme of reproduction and life-history.

Arthur Harry Church

The prophet is always at the mercy of events; nevertheless, I venture to conclude this book with the forecast that at least half the illnesses of mankind will disappear once our food supplies are raised from fertile soil and consumed in a fresh condition.

The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snowbank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter, the conservation of energy, and the immanence of law.

David Starr Jordan

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.

Reginald Farrer

Gardening is always more or less a warfare against nature. It is true we go over to the 'other side' for a few hints, but we might as well abandon our spades and pitchforks as pretend that nature is everything and art nothing.

Shirley Hibberd

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

Arthur Henry Reginald Buller

How much the making of a garden, no matter how small, adds to the joy of living, only those who practice the arts and the science can know.

Ernest Henry Wilson

Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath.

In the gametes of an individual hybrid the Anlagen for each individual parental character are found in all possible combinations but never in a single gamete the Anlagen for a pair of characters. Each combination occurs with approximately the same frequency.

I must own I had always looked on worms as amongst the most helpless and unintelligent members of the creation; and am amazed to find that they have a domestic life and public duties! I shall now respect them, even in our Garden pots; and regard them as something better than food for fishes.

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Fifty years ago Geology was in its infancy; there were but few who cultivated it as a Science...If an unfortunate lover of nature was seen hammering in a stone quarry, he was generally supposed to be slightly demented.

Peter Bellinger Brodie

The noble aim of university teaching is the lifting of mankind to a higher appreciation of the ideas of life and truth. It has to cultivate the most intimate connection between theory and practice, between abstract science and actual life.