Carolus Linnaeus Quotes

Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

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.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

I could take you for a walk on the beach and I could point out just about any creature and give you their Latin names.

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.

I certainly wasn't the kind of kid that grew up collecting bugs and spiders.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

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.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

I'm a science guy. I'm a geek. I love geology and botany and marine science. I thought maybe I'd be a professional guide, or maybe even a park ranger, working for the Department of Fish and Game.

I can pretty much name and rattle off the genus and species of all the bugs you see in everyday life.

I was the kind of kid who liked omnivorously almost all kinds of science - rock collections, fossils - and I like leaves, I like plants, and I like biology.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.

ZOOLOGY, n. The science and history of the animal kingdom, including its king, the House Fly ("Musca maledicta"). The father of Zoology was Aristotle, as is universally conceded, but the name of its mother has not come down to us.

While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.

From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.