George Bentham Quotes

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections.

I definitely am concerned with preservation. For me, what's interesting is the archival state, or how long oil paintings last.

I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

We were totally unprepared for such a large quantity of visitors, and in view of the preservation of the antiquities they being very crowded and in poor preservation, we were obliged to refuse admission until some preparation was made to safeguard the objects.

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal.

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

You know, of course, the specimens are not alive. We have to fix them in a fixing liquid formaldehyde and then we have to do a rinsing and then we have to coat them in a thin layer of gold.

Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'

Such Roots as are soft, your best way is to dry in the Sun, or else hang them up in the Chimney corner upon a string; as for such as are hard you may dry them any where.

This was the first day of our beginning to take up plants: we had much pleasure in collecting them for the natives offered their assistance and perfectly understood the method of taking them up and pruning them.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.

As a child, I remember my own intensive interest in biology, birds, other animals and flowers and was determined at an early age to become a scientist.

Far from being dead, physical media has years of life left and must be preserved because there is no better alternative.

When taxidermy is done well it's an amazing piece of art.

Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.

I won all the blue ribbons for canning at the state fair.

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.

I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.