Quotes from Daniel Stone

He used to say, 'Never be satisfied with what you know, only with what more you can find out.

On an errand that was not likely to be pleasing if explained to the guard, with no papers in my pocket, with a captor whose very look was enough to terrify anyone, and in a jail that would rival in filthiness any that the Inquisition ever had, I think there are few men who would not have paled," he later wrote.

In 1876 at the World's Fair in Philadelphia, a delicacy called a banana, originally a crop of the Malay Islands, made its public debut in the United States, selling for a dime apiece and wrapped in tinfoil to prevent its phallic shape from offending the crowd's Victorian sensibilities. How else to eat one but with a fork and knife?

He didn't know it, but America had a need for David Fairchild. The bare agricultural landscape at the beginning of his life would transform by its end into a colorful portrait: yellows from tropical nectarines and Chinese lemons, reds of blood oranges from Mongolia, greens from Central American avocados and grapes from the Caucasus, even purple from dates, raisins, and eggplants that sprouted first in the Middle East.

The American Home Cook Book proposed cooking eels with a little parsley. Another suggested terrapin turtles boiled with salt.

If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second.

Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

Count among Washington's gifts to his future nation his revelation that cows, rather than horses or sheep, provide the most potent dung.

What would normally be good news instead laid bare a pesky side effect of innovation: greater efficiency required fewer workers, leaving rural communities with little to support themselves.