31 quotes
When a naturalist is thoroughly comfortable and settled, it is time to uproot him.
Flowering Earth (1939)
The fungi are the underworld of plant life, that lives clandestinely, by its unconscious wits, taking to cover in unfavorable times, rioting at another.
Flowering Earth (1939)
Species is but the ideal form; within this idea, within each species, is a diversity of individuality to make the stars look monotonous.
Flowering Earth (1939)
As plantsmen we are interested in the moment when the first plant began. For there was raised the flag of life.
Flowering Earth (1939)
Futile for science to try to discover what the forces of Nature are; it can only discover how they operate.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Old earth is great with her children, the bulb and the grub, and the sleepy mammal and the seed.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
It is my contention that specialization should be left to those who are not mentally gifted at generalization.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Not blood nor flesh not hair nor feathers, not the chlorophyll or cellulose of the plants, is stranger than the stuff called chitin.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Star-gazing is a common name for harmless futility.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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.
The Road of a Naturalist (1941)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)
It is Nature herself, as we grow in comprehension of her, who weans us from our early faith.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
All the great naturalists have been habitual walkers; for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur's or professional's.
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)