Quotes About Discovery

The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture

Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island's warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.

Because I am interested in Colón, I bought a copy of the translation when I spotted it in a used-book store. Part of a series the Italian

In any case these people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture, after a nearby village—had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock Cave and other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.

Only when an unknown genius discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin.

Colón's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

Holmberg's Mistake.

The discovery—an unknown city in Peru that was as old as the Egyptian Pyramids—set off headlines around the world.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor! Here

way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his classic account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician Tobias Dantzig called the discovery of zero "one of the greatest single accomplishments of the human race," a "turning point" in mathematics, science, and technology.

Charles C. Mann

It's only been 400 years since they vanished," he told me. "Why does nobody here know anything about them?

There have been water highways in the forest since before Columbus.

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

I find I look at this province with very different eyes then when I arrived. I recollect I then thought of it as singularly level, but now after galloping over the montañas my own only surprise is what could have induced me to have ever called it level!

July 24th, 1833.—The Beagle sailed from Maldonado, and on August the 3rd she arrived off the mouth of the Rio Negro.

Light will be thrown on the origin of men and his history.