Donald Culross Peattie Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Evolution is not a mere product of life, like starch or blood; it is a part of life itself, just as flow is part of a river.

Donald Culross Peattie
Of all the astronomical events, the fall of a meteorite is the most unnerving and yet the most reassuring. Reassuring because it proves to us that the depths of space are inhabited by bodies made of the same elements we have here on earth, that, at rock bottom, a man and a star are built of the same stuff.

Donald Culross Peattie
As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. … Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. … They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.

Donald Culross Peattie
The bacteria are only the most primitive, and adaptable-to-the-primitive beings that are at present known. They may have had — may still have — antecedents even more hardy and fitted to digest the raw stuff of the universe, perhaps even the interstellar calcium that is one of the recent discoveries of the watchers of the skies.

Donald Culross Peattie
The oldest voice in the world is the wind. When you see it fitfully turning the blades of a mill lazily to draw water, you think of it as an unreliableservant of man. But in truth it is one of ourmasters, obedient only to the lord sun and thewhirling of the great globe itself.

Donald Culross Peattie
It is a strange thing, and a wondrous one, that no one can tell you what a plant is. And when you meet with that which is indefinable, then indeed are you in the presence of something great.

Donald Culross Peattie
As plantsmen we are interested in the moment when the first plant began. For there was raised the flag of life.

Donald Culross Peattie
A Tree in its old age is like a bent but mellowed and wise old man; it inspires our respect and tender admiration; it is too noble to need our pity.

Donald Culross Peattie
It is Nature herself, as we grow in comprehension of her, who weans us from our early faith.

Donald Culross Peattie
A bucketful of water may support ten thousand copepods; but a water snake may require a marsh to himself, as a whale needs league upon league of sea, or a bear the half of a mountainside. It is a question if there be any biologic advantage in mastering your environment when you need such a quantity of it to support you.

Donald Culross Peattie
Star gazing is a common name for harmless futility.

Donald Culross Peattie
A thing is either alive or it isn't; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.

Donald Culross Peattie
Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury—you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.

Donald Culross Peattie
The typical animal egg, once fertilized, develops as a unit; the secret fetus slips out of one stage of development into another, each stage geologic eons from the other, as it recapitulates animal evolution.

Donald Culross Peattie
In short, evolution is not so much progress as it is simply change. It does not leave all its primitive forms behind. It carries them over from age to age, well knowing that they are the precious base of the pyramid on which the more fantastic and costly experiments must be carried.

Donald Culross Peattie
No picture of life today is even worth a glance that does not show the bacteria as the foundation of life itself, the broad base of the pyramid on which all the rest is erected.

Donald Culross Peattie
What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.

Donald Culross Peattie
The more anyone knows about the two kingdoms, animate and vegetating, the less he perceives any boundary between them, until finally he comes to deny the existence of that boundary. Holding the passport of investigation which is stamped with the one great seal of life itself, a biologist travels unchallenged from one realm to the other.

Donald Culross Peattie
Futile for science to try to discover what the forces of Nature are; it can only discover how they operate.

Donald Culross Peattie
When a naturalist is thoroughly comfortable and settled, it is time to uproot him.

Donald Culross Peattie
Of our windows on the universe, science is set with the clearest pane; it is not warped or waved to make the images appear to support any dogma; the glass is not rose-tinted, neither is it leaded with a picture that shuts out the sun and, coming between the light of day and you, enforces the credence of the past upon the young present.

Donald Culross Peattie
It is my contention that specialization should be left to those who are not mentally gifted at generalization.

Donald Culross Peattie
Not blood nor flesh not hair nor feathers, not the chlorophyll or cellulose of the plants, is stranger than the stuff called chitin.

Donald Culross Peattie
Grant but a single teleological explanation in biology, and you have left the path of scientific thinking. Plan there may be, but only a working plan, a vast experimentation still in course.

Donald Culross Peattie
The fungi are the underworld of plant life, that lives clandestinely, by its unconscious wits, taking to cover in unfavorable times, rioting at another.

Donald Culross Peattie
If the plant, from lack of water, should be allowed to perish, one may watch its dance of death, as it twists in the throes of dehydration, droops its heavy head, and falls.

Donald Culross Peattie
Old earth is great with her children, the bulb and the grub, and the sleepy mammal and the seed.

Donald Culross Peattie
Weighted in their armor of cellulose, the higher land plants, it is true, have taken up fixed stations in life. So they have rather surrendered to the animal kingdom the proverbially broadening effects of travel. But they have not lost the power of motion. Like a dancing girl who expresses dance without stirring her feet, they too gesticulate.

Donald Culross Peattie
Species is but the ideal form; within this idea, within each species, is a diversity of individuality to make the stars look monotonous.

Donald Culross Peattie
The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

Donald Culross Peattie