Andrea Barrett Quotes

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.

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

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.

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

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

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

Natural history is not about producing fables.

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'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything.

Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.

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.

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.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

Study nature, not books.

My science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly novel, the entire edifice of science might have to be restructured.

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.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me.

Ever since I was little, I've always had a few science experiments going on.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot.

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.

We have much to learn by studying nature and taking the time to tease out its secrets.