Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries.

As quoted in the closing address by Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, at the Memorial Service for Osborn at St. Bartholomew's Church, N.Y. (18 December 1935); published in "Henry Fairfield Osborn", Supplement to Natural History, Vol. 37, no. 2 (February 1936), p. 133