Louis Agassiz - Methods of study in natural history (1863)

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The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.

Louis Agassiz
The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

Louis Agassiz
I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

Louis Agassiz
The philosopher's stone is no more to be found in the organic than the inorganic world; and we shall seek as vainly to transform the lower animal types into the higher ones by any of our theories, as did the alchemists of old to change the baser metals into gold.

Louis Agassiz
Nothing is more to be deprecated than an over-appreciation of technicalities, valuing the name more highly than the thing; but some knowledge of this scientific nomenclature is necessary to every student of Nature.

Louis Agassiz
It is my belief that naturalists are chasing a phantom, in their search after some material gradation among created beings, by which the whole Animal Kingdom may have been derived by successive development from a single germ, or from a few germs.

Louis Agassiz
The education of a naturalist now consists chiefly in learning how to compare.

Louis Agassiz
A superficial familiarity with the microscope gives no idea of the exhausting kind of labor which the naturalist must undergo who would make an intimate microscopic study of these [ovarian egg] minute living spheres.

Louis Agassiz
Nature does not open her sanctuary without exacting due penance from her votaries.

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

Louis Agassiz