Botanical Quotes
One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kind – mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, paleontological, and so forth- elements of of such a diverse nature that the absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my 'visionary faculties' so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background. To capture it, a little paint or a few lines were enough, a horizon, a sky, a wooden floor, that sort of things. My hallucination had been fixed. Now it was a matter of interpreting the hallucination in a few words or sentences Such as: 'Above the clouds midnight passes. Above midnight glides the invisible bird of day..
Max Ernst
Myself, when young, loved nature rather than sport, and took to Botany as a hobby. Gradually I began to realise that the Family of Grasses was the most important of all, and did my best to become acquainted with that perhaps most difficult of all plant families. ... it is one of the largest of all families in botany, and the flowers are mostly very small and insignificant, and often call for the use of lenses to distinguish them properly. No wonder that other easier, more gaudy and attractive families are preferred by botanical beginners. But once you take a little trouble ... their attraction and their glory grow on you, until at last you surrender completely to their charm.
Jan Smuts
After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort, I determined to go back to Natal.
H. Rider Haggard
It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.
Richard Leakey
