Quotes About Natural history

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.

In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.

If I were beginning my career today, I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if I were beginning today, I'd be there.

The carcasses were covered by a blanket of handsome orange-yellow butterflies, flexing their wings as they fed on the meat. I reflected sadly that natural history often deals harshly with our romantic illusions about wild life. The most brilliantly beautiful butterflies of the tropical rain forest do not fly in search of appropriately gorgeous blossoms, but instead seek a meal from carrion or dung.

specimens, wait until they've been examined, then put them back." "Bone librarian—a most apt description. How many visiting scientists

Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, 'cabinet of curiosities'?" Nora wondered at the man's ability to pile on non sequiturs. "Wasn't it a kind of natural history collection?" "Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many

Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. A great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth.

I never see a forest that does not bear a mark or a sign of history.

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

Any given thing on the face of the earth could reveal the history of all things

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

My interests are varied. They include natural history, lady detectives, and good hygiene," I said with a significant lift of the brows towards his feet. "What in seven hells does that mean?" he demanded. "It means that if you come to bed smelling like something from a barnyard again, I will scrub you myself with rose soap and a firm hand," I threatened.

knew that he had led a failed expedition to the jungles of the Amazon, an expedition that had cost him his marriage and his honor as well as his career as a rising star in the firmament of natural history.

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. —THOMAS HUXLEY

What the Boy chiefly dabbled in was natural history and fairy tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.

The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

Earth writes its history with one hand and erases it with the other, and as we go further back in time, erasure gains the upper hand.

If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

The fossil record quietly accounts for me...

Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.

Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself