Biology

What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and extinction of religious and political systems to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life?

— Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), On Life.

  

Biology occupies a position among the sciences both marginal and central. Marginal because, the living world constituting only a tiny and very ‘special’ part of the universe, it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the whole aim of science is indeed, as I believe, to clarify man’s relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position, since of all the disciplines it is the one that endeavours to go most directly to the heart of the problems that must be resolved before that of ‘human nature’ can even be framed in other than metaphysical terms.
— Jacques Monod (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), Chance and Necessity, Fontana 1974, preface.

 

Gradually a new science emerged. It no longer studied plants and animals as particular classes of natural bodies, but rather the living organism endowed with singular properties as a result of a special kind of organisation. Almost simultaneously, Lamarck, Treviranus and Oken used the term ‘biology’ to define this new science.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), 87.

 

If he can tell a horse from a cow, that is the extent of his knowledge of zoology.
— Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), speaking of Oliver Goldsmith, and quoted in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Oliver Goldsmith.

 

Taxonomy, the most underappreciated of all sciences, is the keystone of historical disciplines.
— Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), The Flamingo’s Smile, Penguin 1991, 19.

 

If we view a Porpess on the outside, there is nothing more than a Fish, but if we look within, there is nothing less.
— Edward Tyson (1651 – 1708), The Anatomy of a Porpess (1680).

 

All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest.
— Holy Bible, Leviticus, 11:20-23, New International Version.

 

A Bat who fell upon the ground and was caught by a Weasel pleaded to be spared his life. The Weasel refused, saying that he was by nature the enemy of all birds. The Bat assured him that he was not a bird, but a mouse, and thus was set free. Shortly afterwards the Bat again fell to the ground and was caught by another Weasel, whom he likewise entreated not to eat him. The Weasel said that he had a special hostility to mice. The Bat assured him that he was not a mouse, but a bird, and thus a second time escaped.

It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.
— Aesop, The Bat and the Weasels.

 The fact that we are able to classify organisms at all in accordance with the structural characteristics which they present, is due to the fact of their being related by descent.

— Ray Lankester (1847 – 1929)

 There are really only individuals in nature, and genera, orders and classes exist only in our imagination.

— Georges Buffon (1707 – 1788).

 I suspect much there may be two species of water-rats. Ray says, and Linnaeus after him, that the water-rat is web-footed behind. Now I have discovered a rat on the banks of our little stream that is not web-footed, and yet is an excellent swimmer and diver…

— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter X.

 Modern biologists sometimes do less than justice to the genius of the men who, behind the bewildering variety of morphologies and modes of life of living beings, succeeded in identifying, if not a unique ‘form’, at least a finite number of anatomical archetypes, each of them invariant within the group characterized. It was of course not difficult to see that seals are mammals closely related to carnivores living on land. It was much harder to discern the same fundamental scheme in the tunicates and the vertebrates, so as to group them together in the phylum Chordata; and it was still more a feat to perceive the affinities between chordates and echinoderms; yet it is certain, and biochemistry confirms it, that sea urchins are more closely related to us than the members of certain much more evolved groups of invertebrates such as the cephalopods, for example.

— Jacques Monod (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), Chance and Necessity, Fontana 1974, 100.

 A plant should be mutually known from its specific name, and the name from the plant, and both from their proper character, written in the former and delineated in the latter.

— Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) (1707 – 1778), The Elements of Botany (1775), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

 It is a folly to use a great many where few words are sufficient.

— Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) (1707 – 1778), The Elements of Botany (1775), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

 My pupil Sparrman has just sailed for the Cape of Good Hope, and another of my pupils, Thunberg, is to accompany a Dutch embassy to Japan; both of them are competent naturalists. The younger Gmelin is still in Persia, and my friend Falck is in Tartary. Mutis is making splendid botanical discoveries in Mexico. Koenig has found a lot of new things in Tranquebar [south India]. Professor Friis Rottböll of Copenhagen is publishing the plants found in Surinam by Rolander. The Arabian discoveries of Forsskål will soon be sent to the press in Copenhagen.

— Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) (1707 – 1778), quoted by Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p 444.

 Life has come to be regarded by the majority of biologists as forming one vast genealogical tree, the roots of which are buried deep down in the lowest fossiliferous strata, and the tops of whose branches, constituting the life that now exists on the globe, are alone seen above the surface.

— John Gibson, ‘Fossil fishes of Scotland’ in Science Gleanings in Many Fields (1884).

 … each pollen was very beautiful and specific: one could distinguish its separate granules, delicate and elegant architectures, small spheres, ovoids, polyhedrons, some smooth and shiny, others bristling with ridges or thorns, white, brown, or golden.

— Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), ‘The Invisible World’ in Other People’s Trades, 50. 

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