Asa Gray
Asa Gray
Asa Grayis considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was also considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 November 1810
CountryUnited States of America
animal change particular points vegetable view
Upon no one of these particular points has there been a completer change of view than upon the distinctness of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
animal plant form
It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.
animal vegetables lines
In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.
philosophical animal views
We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.
animal shapes plant
We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.
animal definitions laying-down
The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.
animal oxygen years
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
real animal two
It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.
animal vegetables next
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
general great likely nearly
Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?
basis held root scientific strike whom
There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.
felt hold people sure understood
I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.
matter soon
But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.
aspired five further occurred proceed proper scientific since subject time within
I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.