19th-century Naturalist Quotes

Charles Darwin

Louis Agassiz

John Muir

Henry Walter Bates

Grant Allen

Edward Forbes

Roy Chapman Andrews

An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.

Among men of deliberate and acute reflection, no difference of opinion can exist relative to the truth of a discovery which rests upon the basis of actual experiment.

Constantine Hering

The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its power it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made.

To the more observant class of sportsmen the stay-at-home naturalist is, of necessity, indebted for most of his information with regard to the habits of large animals and their adaptation to their inanimate environment.

Richard Lydekker

For the book of nature has no beginning as it has no end. Open the book where you will at any point of your life, and if you have the desire to acquire knowledge, you will find it of intense interest, and no matter how long or how intently you study the pages, your interest will not flag for in nature there is no finality.

The Kingdom of Nature is a literal Kingdom. Order and beauty, law and dependence, are seen everywhere. Amidst the great diversity of the forms of life, there is unity; and this suggests that there is one general plan, but carried out in a variety of ways.

The habits of insects are very mines of interesting knowledge, and it is impossible carefully to watch the proceedings of any insect, however insignificant, without feeling that no writer of fiction ever invented a drama of such absorbing interest as is acted daily before our eyes, though to indifferent spectators.

John George Wood

A pompous ornithologist is of all characters one of the most absurd; and the solemnity of scientific pride sits ill upon him who is alternately scaling precipices and wading bogs, chasing the ptarmigan on the weatherbeaten summits of the Highland hills, and pursuing the flights of plovers along the sandy shores of our bays and estuaries.

William MacGillivray

Every plant and every animal has a long history of its own, and that this history leads us on through a wonderful series of continuous metamorphoses compared with which Daphne's or Arethusa's were mere single episodes.

Among the manifold operations of living creatures few have more strongly impressed the casual observer or more deeply interested the thoughtful student than the transformations of insects.

George Herbert Carpenter

Your theory is most excellent, and I shall endeavor to collect facts for you with a view to its elucidation.

Francis Trevelyan Buckland

Elephants are square animals with a leg at each corner - and a tail at both ends.

Philip Stewart Robinson

When a number of closely related varieties and species, occupying adjoining districts of very limited extent, come under observation, the problems connected with the origin of species are liable to be forced upon us.

The feel of a canoe gunnel at the thigh, the splash of flying spray in the face, the rhythm of the snowshoe trail, the beckoning of far-off hills and valleys, the majesty of the tempest, the calm and silent presence of the trees that seem to muse and ponder in their silence; the trust and confidence of small living creatures, the company of simple men; these have been my inspiration and my guide. Without them I am nothing.

An old medical friend gave me some excellent practical advice. He said: "You will have for some time to go much oftener down steps than up steps. Never mind! win the good opinions of washerwomen and such like, and in time you will hear of their recommendations of you to the wealthier families by whom they are employed." I did so, and found it succeed as predicted.

William Crawford Williamson

The shore is almost noisy with the conjugation of the verb to eat in its many tenses.

John Arthur Thomson

The essence of nature guiding is to travel gracefully rather than arrive

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth; it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

Roy Chapman Andrews

Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity. Of all the works of the creation which know the changes of life and death, the trees of the forest have the longest existence.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents.

Henry Walter Bates

The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.

The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.

Nature seems to have gathered them from all the world as specimens of her rarest fountains, to show in one place what she can do.

It must be for truth's sake, and not even for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

Sometime afterward, a terrible misfortune occurred which was in no way calculated to allay the superstitious fears of the ignorant. As some eight or ten citizens were returning with the ferry-boat which had crossed the last Mormons over the Missouri river, into Clay county, the district selected for their new home, the craft filled with water and sunk in the middle of the current; by which accident three or four men were drowned! It was owing perhaps to the craziness of the boat, yet some persons suspected the Mormons of having scuttled it by secretly boring auger-holes in the bottom just before they had left it.