Animals 2

I have found that a fresh cabbage leaf, put under a glass vessel, filled with common air, for the space of one night only, has so affected the air, that a candle would not burn in it next morning, and yet the leaf had not acquired any smell of putrefaction.

— Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2nd edition, 1775.

 

Finding that candles would burn very well in air in which plants had grown a long time, and having had some reason to think, that there was something attending vegetation which restored air that had been injured by respiration, I thought it possible that the same process might also restore the air that had been injured by the burning of candles.

Accordingly, on the 17th of August, 1771, I put a sprig of mint into a quantity of air, in which a wax candle had burned out, and found that, on the 27th of the same month, another candle burned perfectly well in it. This experiment I repeated, without the least variation in the event, not less than eight or ten times in the remainder of the summer.
— Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2nd edition, 1775.

 

Miss Robinson and R. McCance
Have made a notable advance
In dealing with tyrosinase,
And the queer laws which it obeys.
Aided by Anderson and others
Our saccharologist Carruthers
Attacked the problem of rotation
Of glucose during activation.
— J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), ‘Report to the Secretary of the Sir William Dunn Institute for the Year 1924-1925’, quoted by Ronald Clark in J. B. S. : The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, 1968.

 

‘The basis of life is sex; what else can it be?’
— Bhagavad Gita, 16:8, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

 

In men nine out of ten abdominal tumours are malignant; in women nine out of ten abdominal swellings are the pregnant uterus.
— Rutherford Morison (1853 – 1939), The Practitioner, Oct 1965.

 

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it
— Cole Porter (1893 – 1964), Let’s Fall in Love.

 

Castration has a strange effect: it emasculates both man, beast and bird, and brings them to a near resemblance of the other sex. Thus eunuchs have smooth unmuscular arms, thighs and legs; and broad hips, and beardless chins, and squeaking voices.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXXII.

 

The rabbit has a charming face:
Its private life is a disgrace.
I really dare not name to you
The awful things that rabbits do;
Things that the paper never prints —
They only mention them in hints.
They have such lost, degraded souls
No wonder they inhabit holes;
When such depravity is found
It only can live underground.
— Anon

 

I have no doubt that the testicles of a woman are ovaries.
— Steno (1638 – 1686), Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, Florence, 1667.

 

There are not as many men living on the surface of the globe as animalcules in the sperm [semen] of a single male.
— Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

 

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), Notebooks.

 

Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion
— Spike Milligan (1918 – ), The Last Goon Show of All.

 

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
— Henry Louis Mencken (1880 - 1956), Notebooks, "Minority Report".

 

Mrs. Sanger’s pamphlet on birth control, which is addressed to working women, was declared obscene on the ground that working women could understand it. Dr. Marie Stopes’ books, on the other hand, are not illegal, because their language can only be understood by persons with a certain amount of education. The consequence is that, while it is permissible to teach birth control to the well-to do, it is criminate to teach it to wage-earners and their wives. I commend this fact to the notice of the Eugenic Society, which is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to change the state of the law which is the cause of this fact.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), Marriage and Morals, 12.

 

Marie Stopes was then writing a book, Married Love, which was to deal with the plain facts of marriage. She expected it to “electrify” England. She then explained to me that, owing to her previous unfortunate marriage she had no experience in matters of contraception nor any occasion to inform herself of their use… Could I tell her exactly what methods were used? I replied that it would give me the greatest pleasure to bring to her home such devices as I had in my possession. Accordingly, we met again the following week for dinner in her home, and inspected and discussed the French pessary which she stated she then saw for the first time. I gave her my own pamphlets, all of which contained contraceptive information.
— Margaret Louise Sanger (1883 – 1966), My Fight for Birth Control, 1931.

 

When I am grown to man’s estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.
— Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894).

 

‘Do you know who made you?’
‘Nobody as I knows on,’ said the child with a short laugh… ‘I ‘spect I grow’d.’
— Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896), Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

 

The more we discover as to physiological activity and inheritance, the more difficult does it become to imagine any physical or chemical description or explanation which could in any way cover the facts of persistent coordination.
— J. B. S. Haldane (1892 – 1964), The Philosophical Basis of Biology (1931).

 

LORD ILLINGWORTH: I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900), A Woman of No Importance.

 

The atrocious crime of being a young man … I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny, but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of their experience.
— William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708 – 1778).

 

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