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No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

quote by Richard Owen
Added by Lucian Velea
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Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.

quote by Phillip E. Johnson
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One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished.

quote by Ursula Goodenough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

quote by Asa Gray
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

quote by John Berger
Added by Lucian Velea
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Dick and Edward

The Thurso baker, Robert Dick,
Armed with his hammer and his pick,
Dame nature's secrets did reveal,
Which she for ages did conceal.

In Banff has genius found regard
In the person of an Edward,
Who now does rank among the first
In the world as naturalist.

poem by James McIntyre
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Each Other

Laid things
Here and there
Unedited reality
Seems to be natural

Invitation
Broke the reality
And beauty of the disorder

Neatly and nicely arranged
Shingly and hardly cleaned
Structure less structure is structured
Everything calm and quite

Guests came with smiles
Gestures having edited
Both beginning to act
Prepared arena for that

Conversation

[...] Read more

poem by Udaya R. Tennakoon
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Critic and Poet: an Epilogue

("Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned; this man is neither simple, sensuous, nor impassioned; therefore he is not a poet")

No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define--what is a bird,
To classify by rote and book, nor fail
To mark its structure and to note the scale
Whereon its song might possibly be heard.
Thus far, no farther;--so he spake the word.
When of a sudden,--hark, the nightingale!

Oh deeper, higher than he could divine
That all-unearthly, untaught strain! He saw
The plain, brown warbler, unabashed. "Not mine"
(He cried) "the error of this fatal flaw.
No bird is this, it soars beyond my line,
Were it a bird, 'twould answer to my law."

poem by Emma Lazarus
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At the Museum of Natural History

The lessons we learned here
(fumbling with our lunchbags,
handkerchiefs
& secret cheeks of bubblegum)

were graver than any
in the schoolroom:
the dangers of a life
frozen into poses.

Trilobites in their
petrified ghettos,
lumbering dinosaurs
who'd outsized themselves

told how nature was
an endless morality play
in which the cockroach
(& all such beadyeyed

[...] Read more

poem by Erica Jong
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