Scottish Naturalist Quotes

William MacGillivray

William Smellie (encyclopedist)

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

John Arthur Thomson

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

Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.

Natural history is the most extensive, and perhaps the most instructive and entertaining of all the sciences. It is the chief source from which human knowledge is derived. To recommend the study of it from motives of utility, were to affront the understanding of mankind.

William Smellie (encyclopedist)