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Quote by Asa Gray

“I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.”

Quote by Asa Gray

Author

Asa Gray was a prominent American botanist born on November 18, 1810, and died on January 30, 1888. He made significant contributions to the fields of plant taxonomy, plant geography, and plant morphology. more

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“I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.”

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“Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.”

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“It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.”

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“Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.”

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Book:Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College

Source: Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College

“Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.”

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“The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.”

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“This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.”

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“We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.”

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“We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.”

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“Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.”

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Book:Letters of Asa Gray

Source: Letters of Asa Gray