American Zoologist Quotes

Dian Fossey
Edmund Beecher Wilson
Frank Chapman (ornithologist)
Charles Otis Whitman
Libbie Hyman
Arthur Cleveland Bent

The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.

Mankind delights in a mystery of whatever sort, that thrill of something unknown to be discovered. For long years the migration of birds has stood as a delightful and mysterious riddle of Nature, but now bids fair to clear away and unfold more wonderful things than we dreamed of.

Nearly all of the grand, fundamental discoveries and inventions by which man has lifted himself out of his dark animal past were but repetitions of discoveries and inventions which nature had made eras before our anthropoid ancestor first stood erect and looked up into the sky.

If a tree mouse did not exist and I were told to design one, I could hardly improve on Nature's product - a small, sure-footed beast dressed in the protective colors of fir-tree cones, adapted to a resinous diet, and adapted to moving about in a narrow ecological niche.

The bluebird is well named, for he wears a coat of the purest, richest, and most gorgeous blue on back, wings, and tail; no North American bird better deserves the name, for no other flashes before our admiring eyes so much brilliant blue.

Arthur Cleveland Bent
Arthur Cleveland Bent
The physical sciences deal with the external world, and in the laboratory we study the structure and activities of organisms by very similar methods; but if we stop here, neglecting the relation of the living being to its environment, our study is not biology or the science of life.

Not only do our memories sometimes deceive us, but we really see nothing with exactness until we attempt to describe it.

Frank Chapman (ornithologist)
Frank Chapman (ornithologist)
I like the look of frogs, and their outlook, and especially the way they get together in wet places on warm nights and sing about sex.

To the amoeba, the jelly-fish, or the worm, the "world" is the franchise of an hour in a drop of water; a niche in the rocks for a season; or a home in the sea for a decade. To man, the "world" is the universal whole of time and space, for their content are his to explore and to utilize. And therein lies our measure of freedom and attainment.

Other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor. The highest grade of instruction in any science can only be furnished by one who is thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit, and who is actually engaged in original work.

Charles Otis Whitman
Charles Otis Whitman
No man has a right, either moral or legal, to destroy or squander an inheritance of his children that he holds for them in trust. And man, the wasteful and greedy spendthrift that he is, has not created even the humblest of the species of birds, mammals and fishes that adorn and enrich this earth.

Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead to the acceptance of cooperation as a guiding principle both in social theory and as a basis for human behavior. Such a development when it occurs will alter the course of human history.

If sex evolved so that your children are not condemned to be just like you, intelligence evolved so that you are not condemned to be just like yourself.

I shall never forget my first encounter with gorillas. Sound preceded sight. Odor preceded sound in the form of an overwhelming, musky-barnyard, humanlike scent. The air was suddenly rent by a high-pitched series of screams followed by the rhythmic rondo of sharp pok-pok chestbeats from a great silverbacked male obscured behind what seemed an impenetrable wall of vegetation.

Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey
Morphological information has provided the greatest single source of data in the formulation and development of the theory of evolution and that even now, when the preponderance of work is experimental, the basis for interpretation in many areas of study remains the form and relationships of structures.

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

Perhaps it is not amiss to remark that the biologist may not hope to solve the ultimate problems of life any more than the chemist and physicist may hope to penetrate the final mysteries of existence in the non-living world.

Edmund Beecher Wilson
Edmund Beecher Wilson
The whole aim of comparative anatomy is to discover what structures are homologous.

Libbie Hyman
Libbie Hyman