12 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)
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)
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)
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)
There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)
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.
Flowering Earth (1939)