Botanist Quotes

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

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

A Christian minister is a person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servant of God, and therefore ought to be wholly devoted to Him.

Inspiration is never at variance with information; in fact the more information one has, the greater will be the inspiration.

George Washington Carver

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

Terence McKenna

Whatever may be said for ye Antiquity of the Earth itself and bodies lodged in it ye race of mankind is new.

I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world.

G. Ledyard Stebbins

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

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.

Death, my son, is a good for all; it is the night of this worrisome day that one calls life.

In French: La mort, mon fils, est un bien pour tous les hommes; elle est la nuit de ce jour inquiet qu'on appelle la vie.

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

[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

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.

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.

In my view, the only recourse for a scientist concerned about the social consequences of his work is to remain involved with it to the end.

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

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.

Between the lowest and the highest degree of spiritual and corporal perfection, there is an almost infinite number of intermediate degrees. The succession of degrees comprises the Universal Chain. It unites all beings, ties together all worlds, embraces all the spheres. One SINGLE BEING is outside this chain, and this is HE who made it.

Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen.

Christian Konrad Sprengel

The science of fossil shells is the first step towards the study of the earth.

Giovanni Battista Brocchi

Whomsoever is not acquainted with the taste of Salts will never arrive at the knowledge of our Arcana.

Herman Boerhaave

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

These motions were such as to satisfy me, after frequently repeated observation, that they arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.

Summary of Brownian motion

Robert Brown (botanist)

This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.

Wilhelm Johannsen

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.